Banner Week
It’s Banned Books Week over at the American Library Association. As a part of their celebration(?), the ALA has listed the Top 100 Challenged Books from 1990-2000.
I’ve read almost 25% of them:
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Go check out the list and berate me for the ones I should have read.
I’ll get you started… I’ve never read a book by Toni Morrison. I’ve read Blubber, but not Brave New World.
And so forth.
3 Ripples from “Banner Week”
bestman says:
September 28, 2005 at 7:09 am
Well, at first I was blown away that I’ve read Color Purple and Bluest Eye and you haven’t. Get going right now.
But then I saw that you haven’t read Private Parts, and that’s simply inexcusable. How can you attempt any sort of social commentary on such topics as honesty/responsibility in the media, the right to privacy, the first amendment, or strippers when you haven’t read the seminal work of our lifetime on the subject, written by one of the greatest minds of the late 20th century?
Maybe some books should be banned.
zalm says:
September 28, 2005 at 7:09 pm
...or at least universally scorned.
Yeah, The Color Purple is probably another one I need to atone for.
Although I suppose I could just wait to see the musical.
Kevin says:
September 29, 2005 at 10:09 am
Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and Fade are both excellent, if not incredibly disturbing. His best work is I Am the Cheese but those are both worth reading. You should be able to polish them off in a day or so. Stephen King’s Cujo is, well, I wouldn’t call it good. But it’s good for him. If he could just stop forcing his books to be supernatural when they don’t need to be. Being trapped in a car while a huge killer dog stalks you outside is plenty frightening and plenty believable. You don’t have to put a serial killer’s soul in the dog’s body to force the issue.
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