I got this from Mary Poppins; if you’re into such things you can trace back from there. Sometimes you find interesting new-to-you bloggers that way.
Apparently the following 110 books have all been banned for some reason at some time and place. The idea is to indicate which you have read, etc. I’ve bolded those I’ve read all the way through, italicized those I’ve partially read. I had to decide where to draw the line for “partially read”–there are books I’ve read one or two pages of and then set down. I decided to not call them partially read, but I did asterisk** a couple of them.
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Several times. One of the great ones, in my estimation.
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes**
#4 The Koran – in English translation, of course.
#5 Arabian Nights -
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift I think I finished this–I couldn’t swear to it, though.
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. What I know of this book comes from The Classics Reclassified by Richard Armour. It was a hilarious and painless way to learn about some of the books on my English teachers’ recommended reading lists, without actually having to read the books themselves.
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables 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 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Another one of the greats. I used to think that this and Huckleberry Finn were the two most quintessential American novels.
#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 Several times. Another great one.
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Didn’t like it much, but I did finish it.
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal I think I finished it, anyway.
#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 I read this as a teenager. I found my mother’s copy, hidden, in a brown paper bag. I remember being shocked that she had it. I still don’t know if she knew I sneaked it and read it. Chances are she did.
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The 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 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. I may have read this while in the Peace Corps–they had all the British classics there–but I’m not sure, so I won’t claim it.
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Someone banned a book that’s about book burning. Ha. (I think I read almost everything Bradbury ever wrote.)
#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 – I’ve read this at least 10 times, maybe more. I used to open it at random and begin reading, read to the end, then start at the beginning and read back to where I started. It works. Eventually I wore it out for myself–though it’s been long enough that I may try it again some day.
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker. I still can’t believe that Disney made the movie, and made a Disney-type movie of it, and somehow made that work, at least sort of.
#58 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger I don’t think I much understood this one, but all the guys told me it was cool, so I read it.
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Deisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Sort of got it, but not really.
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck Didn’t like it. Don’t really remember the story, just that I didn’t like it.
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl Now why on earth would anyone ban this?
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Used to read everything Vonnegut wrote, too, but toward the end he seemed to be running a bit dry.
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse In English, of course.
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Hated this. I know, I know, it’s cool. Still hated it.
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Several times. “Grok” is a useful word with no perfect synonym in English, but I don’t use it much anymore, since I can’t count on my listeners to have read the book.
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburn Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes The short story is excellent; the book he did from it, not as good.
What impresses me, as I look at the number of these that I’ve read, is how little I remember of many of them. I remember some of them well, but others, about all I could tell you about them is that I did read them.
