Read a (Banned) Book

Via Vagabond Scholar, see Banned Books Week and the National Book Festival, 2008, this week (September 27th to October 4th ) is Celebrate Your Freedom to Read!
Banned Books Week.

Each year libraries, schools, and book lovers come together for Banned Books Week, a celebration of the freedom to read without censorship. Of course, if McCain/Palin get elected, they will probably ban Banned Books Week, so be sure to participate this year. The Free Library of Philadelphia has an event October 1 at 7:30 PM. See Phawker for details.

Amazingly, many of the top 100 books have been on Banned Book Lists:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Ulysses, James Joyce
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Native Son, Richard Wright
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
Women in Love, DH Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, John Updike

From Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century (source cites reasons why book is banned).

Think about those statistics: Of the Top 100 Novels, 44 have been banned/challenged.

Out of those, I've read all but the following:

Ulysses, James Joyce
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, John Updike

In honor of Banned Book Week, read a banned book. I think I'll read The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult, which is on a list of books banned in 2007-2008, which I found on my daughter's bookshelf.



(Photos via Phawker)