Banned Book Week: What Banned Book Have You Read Lately?

Visits to the public library were among my favorite summer activity growing up. My mother would pack my brother and me into the car and off we would go. We'd be let loose among the stacks and allowed to roam to our heart's content. I don't remember my parents ever telling me I couldn't read a particular book.

I do believe in a parent's right to guide his or her children in choosing appropriate reading material when necessary; I think it's smart parenting to know what your children are reading, listening to, watching, and playing. However, what I do not get behind is when someone or a group of people decide that no one should be allowed to read a particular book. And so they challenge it and request it be banned. Often books are challenged because they raise viewpoints that differ from someone else's. Or perhaps they touch upon subject matter that the person finds offensive or uncomfortable. I respect a person's right to have his or her own opinion about any book. I truly do. But do not tell me what I should and should not read, or anyone else for that matter.

When it gets right down to it, censorship is dangerous. Those who would censor argue the opposite, but shutting down ideas and thoughts, not allowing people to be heard and others to hear what others have to say is detrimental to society as a whole. You cannot protect anyone by censoring reading material. We are only made more vulnerable as a result.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

To kick start Banned Books Week, which started this weekend, I followed Florinda's lead and looked over the list of books tagged as banned on LibraryThing's catalog. I was curious to see which one's I'd read. Of the top 150 books listed, I was pleased to see I had read a number of them:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Forever by Judy Blume
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Odyssey by Homer
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Blubber by Judy Blume
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Dracula by Bram Stoker
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

I have read chunks of both The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and the Bible, both of which were included in the top 150 books list on LibraryThing. And many more are books on the list are sitting in my TBR room waiting their turn. I look at these titles and I find myself scratching my head in wonderment at what could be so threatening about any of them.

What was the last banned book or challenged book you read?

Later in the week, I will be reviewing a book called Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, which made recent news as one man attempted to have the book banned because of its content, I chose that particular book for personal reasons, but I think it also speaks to a much broader topic, one that ties nicely into this week's theme. Books like Speak need to be read, need to be given a voice, for all our sakes. They offer much needed perspective on a serious problem in our society. Topics such as sexual assault and teen depression do more harm than good when swept under the carpet.

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