This week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. No, it's not because it's finally fall. It's not because the weather is finally cooling down. It's Banned Book Week. The American Library Association puts on the event every year to celebrate our freedom to read and to make people aware that even in a nation that Constitutionally guarantees ones right to free speech, there are people who seek to ban creative works. Personally, I am one of those people who, if told a book is banned, I want to read it even more. Every year the ALA publishes a list of the books that are most challenged. This year, they published a list of banned and/or challenged books from the Radcliffe Publishing list of the 100 Top Novels of the 20th Century. Here are the books on that list that have been challenged and/or banned.
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
- The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- Beloved - Toni Morrison
- The Lord Of The Flies - William Golding
- 1984 - George Orwell
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
- Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying -William Faulkner
- A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
- Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
- Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
- Song Of Solomon - Toni Morrison
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son - Richard Wright
- One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
- 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 Chatterly's Lover - DH Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
- In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
- Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
- Sons And Lovers - DH Lawrence
- Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace - John Knowles
- Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
- Women In Love - DH Lawrence
- The Naked And The Dead - Norman Mailer
- Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller
- An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
- Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Books are banned and challenged all the time. Books are even burned, which I think is heresy. But the best way to combat those narrow-minded people who, instead of just not reading the books they don't like or not allowing their children to and want to regulate what we all do, is to read the books that they object to.
I have read Lolita. I did not like it and thought it was a justification for child molestation. I thought Slaughterhouse Five was nothing more than an acid trip. I thought Lord Of The Flies was stupid. But it really doesn't matter what I think about any of these books. The only thing that matters is that I live in a country where the authors are free to write them, I am free to read them, and free to express my opinion. I have no problem with people who do not want their children reading To Kill A Mockingbird because it contains the "N" word. But for them to turn around and tell me that I can't read it, well, that's an entirely different ballgame.
So, my challenge to you, my three loyal readers, is to pick up a banned and/or challenged book and read it. Make a statement. Exercise your freedom to read whatever you want to read.