Happy Banned Books Week
What's the last banned book you've read?
Because one of the pleasures of Banned Books Week (instituted by the American Library Association in 1982) is the fantastic booklists you get to contemplate -- of titles that someone somewhere sometime felt moved to hide from you -- happy reading memories and still unread wonders just waiting to jazz up a to-be-read pile that may have gotten too one-note or work-oriented.
Like the one I'm going to cut and paste below of 42 books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course's Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century -- all of which have been banned or challenged by someone somewhere:
How many of the books on the list above have you read? Never read? Picked up and didn't finish?
When romance novelist Anna Campbell posted the list on Facebook, various Friends weighed in. I read 25 of them to the end and didn't finish 6 -- must get back especially to Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I now remember I put aside when I was first studying computer programming. And although I've read some of the Hemingway on the list, I've never seriously read the earlier, tighter Hemingway that I've always meant to. I read Rabbit Run when I was too young entirely to get it and skipped Rabbit Redux. Hmm -- wouldn't it be great to read the whole series front to back (not skipping the fantastic short story about the Thanksgiving after Rabbit's death)?
After I finally get around to Slaughterhouse-Five.
And if (like me for so many years), you've avoided In Cold Blood, I urge you to give it a try, as I did a year or two ago when prompted by curiosity after the spate of Capote movies. I'd expected voyeurism, thrill-seeking, beautiful but chilly language -- but though the language is beautiful, the surprise is the compassion. Capote's passage on the murdered teenage daughter's diary is a stunning meditation on youth and potentiality cut brutally, heartbreakingly, irrevocably short in the process of self-discovery.
My book count was good but not great -- historical romance novelist and hoyden reader Louisa Cornell has read every book on the list!
And I was fascinated to learn that not everybody loved The Catcher in the Rye, which book's opening paragraph changed my young life:
All that David Copperfield kind of crap. As my husband Michael put it years later, "I didn't know you were allowed to say things like that in a book." I didn't either, nor did I know it was possible to create prose that sounded so voiced -- I can hear The Catcher in the Rye in my first novel, Carrie's Story, written by Molly Weatherfield (and in the penname, which, if you want the truth, comes from Holden Caulfield's little sister Phoebe's penname, Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield.)
But we all have our own reading biographies, our personal histories and secret museums (to use the title of Walter Kendrick's book about the banned books tradition in English, beginning with the eighteenth century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, when sexy art from classical times were exposed to the light of day, and gentlemen had to figure out how to keep this stuff away from people who weren't... gentlemen. (I posted about this last year -- my own inner secret museum always seems to go back to Enlightenment Europe).
We may even have personal aspirations in this line. Mine, I confide, is to be read on the sly by babysitters. I'm with women's fiction writer and book blogger Lisa Dale when she celebrates Banned Books Week by musing -- hilariously -- on the adventurousness and forbiddenness of reading. Not to say that anybody should ever ban any book. (Any -- got that? When Michael and I were part-owners of Modern Times Bookstore, an interview question Michael would ask job applicants was "What do you say when someone asks you to special-order The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion?" And the answer? "Do you want cloth or paper?")
Luckily, no one ever did ask for that special order. But reading can be dangerous. In the sense that it makes you who you are, which isn't someone who anybody else could have made you be. In the sense that language is magical and powerful.
"Magic is real," they say in the book that's had me transfixed this week, Lev Grossman's very smart, deeply moving, and very adult fantasy novel The Magicians. Books, language, stories -- perhaps particularly when they're real enough for someone to ban -- bring us back to the real via the great circle route of the imagination.
This is a week for celebrating all that.
For bringing out our own readers' biographies (and perhaps how we became writers as well).
For making lists, counting how many you've read.
Recommending the one you like and slamming the ones you don't, and sharing it here if you've a mind to.
And -- if anybody knows, I'd love to hear it -- has a romance novel (historical or not) ever made it to a banned list?
Because one of the pleasures of Banned Books Week (instituted by the American Library Association in 1982) is the fantastic booklists you get to contemplate -- of titles that someone somewhere sometime felt moved to hide from you -- happy reading memories and still unread wonders just waiting to jazz up a to-be-read pile that may have gotten too one-note or work-oriented.
Like the one I'm going to cut and paste below of 42 books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course's Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century -- all of which have been banned or challenged by someone somewhere:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitzgeraldThere's some excellent information on the ALA's website about the circumstances surrounding how and why a book gets banned or challenged. Often it's about sex, sometimes religion or politics -- these days it's often about homosexuality. But sometimes it's something else entirely, as in 1983 when four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the removal of Anne Frank's Diary because it was a "real downer." Welcome to Prozac Nation.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ulysses by James Joyce
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1984 by George Orwell
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
How many of the books on the list above have you read? Never read? Picked up and didn't finish?
When romance novelist Anna Campbell posted the list on Facebook, various Friends weighed in. I read 25 of them to the end and didn't finish 6 -- must get back especially to Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I now remember I put aside when I was first studying computer programming. And although I've read some of the Hemingway on the list, I've never seriously read the earlier, tighter Hemingway that I've always meant to. I read Rabbit Run when I was too young entirely to get it and skipped Rabbit Redux. Hmm -- wouldn't it be great to read the whole series front to back (not skipping the fantastic short story about the Thanksgiving after Rabbit's death)?After I finally get around to Slaughterhouse-Five.
And if (like me for so many years), you've avoided In Cold Blood, I urge you to give it a try, as I did a year or two ago when prompted by curiosity after the spate of Capote movies. I'd expected voyeurism, thrill-seeking, beautiful but chilly language -- but though the language is beautiful, the surprise is the compassion. Capote's passage on the murdered teenage daughter's diary is a stunning meditation on youth and potentiality cut brutally, heartbreakingly, irrevocably short in the process of self-discovery.
My book count was good but not great -- historical romance novelist and hoyden reader Louisa Cornell has read every book on the list!
And I was fascinated to learn that not everybody loved The Catcher in the Rye, which book's opening paragraph changed my young life:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want the truth.
All that David Copperfield kind of crap. As my husband Michael put it years later, "I didn't know you were allowed to say things like that in a book." I didn't either, nor did I know it was possible to create prose that sounded so voiced -- I can hear The Catcher in the Rye in my first novel, Carrie's Story, written by Molly Weatherfield (and in the penname, which, if you want the truth, comes from Holden Caulfield's little sister Phoebe's penname, Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield.)
But we all have our own reading biographies, our personal histories and secret museums (to use the title of Walter Kendrick's book about the banned books tradition in English, beginning with the eighteenth century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, when sexy art from classical times were exposed to the light of day, and gentlemen had to figure out how to keep this stuff away from people who weren't... gentlemen. (I posted about this last year -- my own inner secret museum always seems to go back to Enlightenment Europe).
We may even have personal aspirations in this line. Mine, I confide, is to be read on the sly by babysitters. I'm with women's fiction writer and book blogger Lisa Dale when she celebrates Banned Books Week by musing -- hilariously -- on the adventurousness and forbiddenness of reading. Not to say that anybody should ever ban any book. (Any -- got that? When Michael and I were part-owners of Modern Times Bookstore, an interview question Michael would ask job applicants was "What do you say when someone asks you to special-order The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion?" And the answer? "Do you want cloth or paper?")Luckily, no one ever did ask for that special order. But reading can be dangerous. In the sense that it makes you who you are, which isn't someone who anybody else could have made you be. In the sense that language is magical and powerful.
"Magic is real," they say in the book that's had me transfixed this week, Lev Grossman's very smart, deeply moving, and very adult fantasy novel The Magicians. Books, language, stories -- perhaps particularly when they're real enough for someone to ban -- bring us back to the real via the great circle route of the imagination.
This is a week for celebrating all that.
For bringing out our own readers' biographies (and perhaps how we became writers as well).
For making lists, counting how many you've read.
Recommending the one you like and slamming the ones you don't, and sharing it here if you've a mind to.
And -- if anybody knows, I'd love to hear it -- has a romance novel (historical or not) ever made it to a banned list?
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