109 most banned books -- grabbed from indefagitable42

[capri0mni]

Take this and pass it on. Put in bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you've read parts of, and underline the ones you've put on your "to read" list.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
59. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
60. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
61. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
62. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
63. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
64. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
65. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
66. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
67. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
68. The Talmud
69. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
70. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
71. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
72. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
73. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
74. Separate Peace by John Knowles
75. Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
76. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
77. Popol Vuh
78. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
79. Satyricon by Petronius
80. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
81. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
82. Black Boy by Richard Wright
83. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
84. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
85. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
86. Metaphysics by Aristotle
87. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
88. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
89. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
90. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
91. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
92. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
93. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
94. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
95. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
97. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
98. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
99. Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
100. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
101. Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
102. Nana by Emile Zola
103. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
104. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
105. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
106. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
107. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
108. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
109. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Notes and comments:
1. I want to have more of the Bible under my belt more as a cultural document than anything else.
3. I can't actually remember if I've read this or not. If I have, it's probably due for re-read. It is considered by many to be the first novel ever written.
5. I actually have an incomplete library set waiting for me
6. I read Huckleberry Finn, but I can't remember if I've read Tom Sawyer
20. The excerpts from Essays that I have read are excellent. Again, as Cervantes invented the novel, Montaigne is considered to have invented the essay.
29. Candide is one of the funniest literary satires I've ever read -- highly recommended!
50. Just... how ironic is that?!!
52. I didn't know Critique of Pure Reason existed until I saw it on this list. But I was talking with my dad last night, and we were discussing how too much reason can get you in trouble So -- nifty!
54. Again, didn't know about this. But I like the title ... it sounds pro-fun!
80. Mother read this to me the summer I was in a body cast for orthopedic surgery. One of my favorite stories. I recommend it -- especially if you're lying in a hammok on a summer day....

109 is an strange number to stop at. I wonder what #110 is...

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote was written in the early 17th century... Lady Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji trumps it by six hundred years. ;)

I've heard it said often that the 'novel' as we know it was invented by the Japanese, but nobody mentions except by saying her name that it was invented by a woman.

ooh!

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Of course, I'm just repeating what I learned in my World Lit. class in college. Our textbook was Norton's Anthology of World Literature, and I noted even then that the anthology didn't include any literature from Asia, Africa, or the non-European Americas.

IIRC, the excerpts from Don Quixote were the only contributiions from Spain, and all the other stories were from France, Germany, Britian, and Russia (and now that I think about it, I can't remember if any of the stories that were included were written by women).

:::Looks at the globe:::

Oh, yeah. That covers the world, all right. Believe that, and I have some magic beans to give you...

[pedanther]

To be fair, it's worth noting that Cervantes had probably never heard of Genji (I wouldn't bet on him having heard of Japan, for that matter), so as far as he and his audience and his successors were concerned it was the first novel; and even from our expanded viewpoint Cervantes did invent the novel, even if he wasn't the first person to do it.

But it is of course important to remember the distinction between that and "Cervantes wrote the first novel".

Incidentally, have you ever read Jorge Luis Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote"? It's a fictional obituary of a twentieth-century poet who set out to write Don Quixote - not just to rip off Cervantes, mind you, but to mould himself into a person who would write Don Quixote in just the same way that other people write new novels that have never been written before. It's very odd.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

even from our expanded viewpoint Cervantes did invent the novel, even if he wasn't the first person to do it.

True. And I'd bet dollars to donuts that there was more than one person to invent the axled-wheel, and the fire-starting bow, too...

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote sounds like it would be a good read... yet another one to be put on the "to read" list.

[pedanther]

50. Just... how ironic is that?!!

The banning of a book that criticizes the banning of books? That's pretty much the opposite of "ironic", as I understand the term. Ironic would be the banning of a book that supports the banning of books.


I'm part-way through Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I sometimes suspect that I will remain part-way through it for the rest of my life. I'm up to the bit where Winston Smith is going around in a joyous daze because the woman he's fallen in love with loves him too, and every time I consider picking the book up again and seeing what happens next I always find I have something else I need to do...

[drox.livejournal.com]

Ironic would be the banning of a book that supports the banning of books.

So maybe #73 - Mein Kampf - would qualify? Not that I've read it, and I have no idea whether it advocates book-banning, but its author certainly did.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I have not read Mein Kampf either -- nor have I any desire to.

Not so much because I don't want to subject myself to Hitler's thoughts (though I don't, particularly, thankyouverymuch), but because I've heard that it is one of the clumsiest, incoherent, and downright painful arrangement of written words ever put to paper.

Standing up for the freedom of human thought is one thing. But for me, art trumps righteous politics.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I guess what I find ironic is the whole situation in context: Ray Bradbury writes a book as a political and social act in order to protect books from being banned, and his book is in the top 50% of those being banned.

And that he wrote it as science fiction when it turns out to be more factual than not. The blurring of the boundries between make-believe and reality is one of metaphysical situations that I find most fascinating.

I suppose I should put Nineteen Eight-Four in italics, as I gave up reading every word somewhere in the penultimate chapter, and just skimmed the rest until I got to "The End."

I'll just say that I wasn't surprised to learn that Orwell wrote the novel while suffering from tuberculosis, and that his health was failing rapidly at the end.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Little House on the Prairie? I can't imagine why anyone would find that controversial!

Isn't there an official "Read a banned book" month?

Just for the record, I agree that Farenheit 451 being on a list of banned books is totally ironic. I knew exactly what you meant. :)

[kiri-l.livejournal.com]

I asked the same question. THe answer is in my LJ (top post at the moment) Has to do with the portayal of Indians.

why not 110?

[kiri-l.livejournal.com]

I don't know. The person I grabbed this from did have it as 110, but there were only 109 listed - so I changed it. =)

Re: why not 110?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the person who copy-and-pasted the list just missed a line.