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- Shogi, on 09/29/2008, -0/+408Well I just found a bunch of new entries to my must-read list.
- Dietrich, on 09/29/2008, -18/+341No "Origin of Species?"
Color me surprised. - Jimbeeer, on 09/29/2008, -15/+286Buried for putting over 11 pages and being littered with adverts on every ***** page.
Bollocks to them.
(Maybe i shouldn't have chosen a Monday to quite smoking...) - jeevesatvic, on 09/29/2008, -1/+235In the context of all those other works, it's a little disconcerting to see the Harry Potter series at the end. I'm not saying they aren't enjoyable books, but it's hard to take that seriously when the author of the previous book in the list had a $1 millon bounty put on his head and had to go into hiding for a decade.
Also I second Dietrich's comment. Origin of Species has been far more challenged that many of the books in this list. - elevatedms, on 09/29/2008, -0/+198For those who don't like to read or click through all the pages. I don't think they're in a particular order, most of them are obvious (coming from Time):
Candide
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Brave New World
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Catcher in the Rye
Lolita
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
The Anarchist Cookbook
The Satanic Verses
Harry Potter Series - ScrewedThePooch, on 09/29/2008, -5/+174Time's website blows. 10 pages is *****. For those of you who don't want to be inundated with ads:
Since 1982, the American Library Association has sponsored Banned Books Week to pay tribute to free speech and open libraries. The tradition began as a nod to how far society has come since 1557, when Pope Paul IV first established The Index of Prohibited Books to protect Catholics from controversial ideas. Four-hundred and nine years later, Pope Paul VI would abolish it, although attempts at censorship still remain. Here, TIME presents some of the most challenged books of all time.
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Candide by Voltaire
This enduringly popular French satire lampoons all things sacred — armies, churches, philosophers, even the doctrine of optimism itself. In search of "the best of all possible worlds," Voltaire's ever-hopeful protagonist's instead encounters life's worst tragedies, describing them in a rapid, meticulous and matter-of-fact way, with the effect being equal parts hilarious and shocking. (Imagine Monty Python circa 1759). The book's popular phrase "Let us eat the Jesuit. Let us eat him up!" became a popular phrase in French society.
The Great Council of Geneva and the administrators of Paris banned it shortly after its release, although 30,000 copies sold within a year, making it a best-seller. In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of the book, and, in 1944, the U.S. Post Office demanded that Candide be dropped from the catalog for major retailer Concord Books
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
In 1885, the Concord, Mass. Public Library banned the year-old book for its "coarse language" — critics deemed Mark Twain's use of common vernacular (slang) as demeaning and damaging. One reviewer dubbed it "the veriest trash ... more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people." Little Women author Louisa May Alcott lashed out publicly at him, saying, "If Mr. Clemens [Twain's original name] cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them." (That the word "*****" appears more than 200 times throughout the book did not initially cause much controversy). In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library followed Concord's lead, banishing the book from the building's juvenile section, explaining: "Huck not only itched but scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration." Twain enthusiastically fired back, once saying of his detractors: "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." Luckily for him, the book's fans would eventually outnumber its critics. "It's the best book we've had," Ernest Hemingway proclaimed, "All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Despite Hemingway's assurances, Huck Finn remains one of the most challenged books in the U.S. In an attempt to avoid controversy, CBS Television produced a made-for-TV adaptation of the book in 1955 that lacked a single mention of slavery, or even any African American cast members to portray the character of Jim. In 1998, parents in Tempe, Ariz. sued the local high school over the book's inclusion on a required reading list. The case went as far as a federal appeals court; the parents lost.
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's 1932 work — about a drugged, dull and mass-produced society of the future — has been challenged for its themes of sexuality, drugs, and suicide. The book parodies H.G. Wells utopian novel Men Like Gods, and expresses Huxley's disdain for the youth- and market-driven culture of the United States. Chewing gum, then as now a symbol of America's teeny-bopper shoppers, pops up in the book as a way to deliver sex hormones and subdue anxious adults; pornographic films called "feelies" are also popular grown-up pacifiers.In Huxley's vision of the 26th century, Henry Ford is the new God (worshipers say "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord,") and the car maker's concept of mass production has been applied to human reproduction. As recently as 1993, a group of parents attempted to ban the book in Corona-Norco, Calif. because it "centered around negativity."
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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
It's both ironic and fitting that Nineteen Eighty-Four would join the American Library Association's list of commonly challenged books given its bleak warning of totalitarian censorship. Written in 1949 by the British while he lay dying of tuberculosis, the book chronicles the grim future of a society robbed of free will, privacy or truth. Some reviewers called it a veiled attack against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet ruler's infamous "midnight purges," though, oddly enough, parents in Jackson County, Fla. would challenge the book in 1981 for being "pro-Communist." The book spawned terms like "Big Brother" and "Orwellian" and continues to appear in pop culture — most recently as the inspiration for a political YouTube hit. The year 1984 may have passed, but the book's message remains as relevant as ever.
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The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Within two weeks of its 1951 release, Salinger's novel rocketed to #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Ever since, the book — which explores three days in the life of a troubled 16-year-old boy — has been "a favorite of censors since its publication," according to the American Library Association. In 1960, school administrators at a high school in Tulsa, Okla. fired an English teacher for assigning the book to an 11th grade class. While the teacher later won his appeal, the book remained off the required reading list. Another community in Columbus, Oh. deemed the book "anti-white," and formed a delegation to have it banned from local schools. One library banned it for violating codes on "excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence, and anything dealing with the occult." When asked about the bans, Salinger once said: "Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach."
The book introduced slang expressions like the term "screw up" (as in, "Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful.") Literary critics have both hailed and assailed the novel, which broke the literary mold with its focus on character development rather than plot. Holden Caulfield, the novel's protagonist, has since become a symbol of adolescent angst. In 1980, 25-year-old Mark David Chapman shot Beatles legend John Lennon in front of his Manhattan home and later gave the book to police as an explanation for why he did it.
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Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
First published in France by a pornographic press, this 1955 novel explores the mind of a self-loathing and highly intelligent pedophile named Humbert Humbert, who narrates his life and the obsession that consumes it: his lust for "nymphets" like 12-year-old Dolores Haze. French officials banned it for being "obscene," as did England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. Today, the term "lolita" has come to imply an oversexed teenage siren, although Nabokov, for his part, never intended to create such associations. In fact, he nearly burned the manuscript in disgust, and fought with his publishers over whether an image of a girl should be even be included on the book's cover.
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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
This 1970 memoir, the first of Angelou's five autobiographical works, angered censors for its graphic depiction of racism and sex, especially the passages in which she recounts being raped by her mother's boyfriend as an eight-year-old child. (In the book, which was later nominated for a National Book Award, Angelou alludes to the Bible, writing: "The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator can't.") The American Library Association ranked it the 5th most challenged book of the 21st century. The book's title refers to the 1899 poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the nation's first prominent African American poets. In 1993, Angelou would read an original poem at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration, becoming only the second poet in U.S. history to do so after Robert Frost's 1960 speech for J.F.K.
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The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Powell was just 19 when he wrote this 1971 cult classic. The guerrilla how-to book managed to not only anger government officials, but anarchist groups as well. One such organization, CrimethInc., said the book misrepresents anarchist ideals and later released its own book of the same name. Other critics attacked the book for more practical reasons — some of the bomb-making recipes that Powell included turned out to be dangerously inaccurate. Ironically, an older and purportedly wiser Powell later tried to censor his own book. After converting to Christianity, Powell publicly denounced his work, writing in 2000 on Amazon.com that the book is "a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in." But even Powell couldn't successfully ban the book from print; he no longer owns the rights.
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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
This book sparked riots across the world for what some called a blasphemous treatment of the Islamic faith (throughout the book, Rushdie refers to the Prophet Muhammad as Mahound, the medieval name for the devil). In 1989, five people died in riots in Pakistan and a stone-throwing mob injured 60 people in India. Although Rushdie issued an apology, Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly condemned the Indian-British author to death, putting a $1 million bounty on his head (an Iranian assassin would get $3 million, Khomeini promised). While European nations recalled their diplomats from Tehran, some Muslim authors, like Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz defended Rushdie and accused the Ayatollah of "intellectual terrorism." Meanwhile, Venezuelan officials threatened anyone who owned or read the book with 15 months of prison. Japan fined anyone who sold the English-language edition; a Japanese translators was subsequently stabbed to death for his involvement with the book. Two major U.S. booksellers — Walden Books and Barnes & Noble — removed the book from shelves after receiving death threats. And while Rushdie's publisher, Viking Penguin, denounced such "censorship by terrorism and intimidation," threats of violence forced the company to temporarily close its New York City office to improve security. Under the protection of British authorities, Rushdie himself lived in hiding for nearly a decade.
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Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
In 2001, a group of parents in Lewiston, Maine staged an old-fashioned book-burning to torch a series of books they claimed were promoting violence, witchcraft and devil-worship. (The fire department intervened before the first match was struck, and the protest's organizer settled for a pair of scissors with which to mutilate the books.) Though Harry Potter was still in his literary infancy, the boy wizard's saga had already garnered its fair share of opponents; similar public displays of contempt occurred throughout the country. While Rowling has concluded the series, the book still prompts some unsettling displays of public emotion, although most now involve elaborate costumes and patient movie-ticket lines. - jlhoben, on 09/29/2008, -9/+135Soon to be added - the American Constitution.
- shibbz, on 09/29/2008, -7/+128Dugg for 1984 and Brave New World.
- chrissku, on 09/29/2008, -6/+122"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." - Oscar Wilde
- alexanEmpire, on 09/29/2008, -2/+116"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
- Ninjasoldat, on 09/29/2008, -1/+94Harry Potter is clearly the most dangerous text of our time.
- ScottMcIntyre, on 09/29/2008, -2/+83An interesting collection of books and reasons why they were banned. For example, I had no idea Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was banned in the US.
QFA:"In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library followed Concord's lead, banishing the book from the building's juvenile section, explaining: "Huck not only itched but scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration." Twain enthusiastically fired back, once saying of his detractors: "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - ngmcs8203, on 09/29/2008, -1/+74"Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue."
- Atsumori, on 09/29/2008, -3/+68Every one of those should be treasured, banning books is a sin. Reading Fahrenheit 451 just reinforces that (a brilliant book, surprised that isn't on there too).
- whahaa, on 09/29/2008, -3/+58you can do it!
- chrissku, on 09/29/2008, -3/+55"This is slavery, not to speak one's thought."- Euripides
- inactive, on 09/29/2008, -1/+50Half of those were required reading for me in high school, and banning of Harry Potter is just stupid.
- nofate2029, on 09/29/2008, -4/+53NO book should be banned.
Written word is one of mankinds best achievements, and it should NEVER be banned, no matter what material or context it may contain. - AmyVernon, on 09/29/2008, -9/+57I'm proud to say I've read half the books on this list. Now I have some new ones to put on my reading list. Except the Harry Potter series.
- MatthewDuke, on 09/29/2008, -1/+47"The Catcher in the Rye" just gets better as I get older. Fantastic book.
- chrissku, on 09/29/2008, -3/+46"One man's vulgarity is another's lyric." - John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court justice, 1971
- vinceislegend, on 09/29/2008, -8/+44Buried for lack of A Clockwork Orange.
- pattykakes887, on 09/29/2008, -1/+34Good one BoonTobias, too bad no book should ever be banned.
- LogicBomB, on 09/29/2008, -1/+33Reading is my favorite hobby that I never get around to doing. I'm thinking I should go to bed earlier and put a lamp next to the bed.
- secrity, on 09/29/2008, -0/+28The banning of any book is just stupid. I think that Harry Potter is a good inclusion just to show how stupid book banning is.
- Hinducow28, on 09/29/2008, -2/+30No Fahrenheit 451?
- insertAliasHere, on 09/29/2008, -3/+31So just because it wasn't banned means you can't add it to your reading list?
Try it, it won't hurt. You might enjoy it. - aliendisaster, on 09/29/2008, -0/+27@Nannybell
Anyone that wants to burn books deserves no respect. - Ligeia, on 09/29/2008, -0/+26These are not only controversial books, but some of the greatest literature the world has ever seen. You can be sure that if the majority of society opposes anything artistic, that it is well ahead of its time and/or a masterpiece. Lolita comes to mind....
- inactive, on 09/29/2008, -3/+28Don't poke fun at people if you're more retarded than they are.
- W16three, on 09/29/2008, -11/+36Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
+
adblock plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1865
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You not complaining - nickymouse, on 09/29/2008, -3/+28I guess this might be the US. The world version would have the Bible at number one. You can go to prison or get killed in many countries for having it in your possession.
- feb420, on 09/29/2008, -4/+29It wasn't banned for any sort of controversial themes. It wasn't even banned, a bunch of religious nut jobs are just scared of witches.
- inactive, on 09/29/2008, -8/+32I always thought the banning of Harry Potter was strange, but then again, when you believe in the Bible, I guess I can see how a fictional story about people with magical powers might be seen as a threat.
- inactive, on 09/29/2008, -1/+24hustler and swank were banned in my local liquor store.
- Stavrosian, on 09/29/2008, -0/+23That's because kids who read the books learned to do sorcery and cast the confundus charm on the clergy, obviously.
- BXRWXR, on 09/29/2008, -9/+31Mein Kampf?
The Communist Manifesto? - graemee, on 09/29/2008, -1/+23More than once, seems some found the racial aspects problematic, yet rap albums sell better with the same one dimensional language.
- ParanoydAndroid, on 09/29/2008, -0/+21"I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things." - Dorothy Parker
- glennkachmar, on 09/29/2008, -4/+25Why not the Harry Potter series?
- noisician, on 09/29/2008, -1/+22your curriculum included Harry Potter, Satanic Verses, and Anarchist Cookbook???
sorry, don't really believe you that your teacher selected all of those books for the class to read. - pap232323, on 09/29/2008, -0/+19but as soon as our children discover that one of the characters is gay they will become homosexuals get married adopt kids and rape them.
- sexybobo, on 09/29/2008, -21/+40No Bible?
This list is not accurate. - whatwhatwhoa, on 09/29/2008, -1/+20With stories of friendship, courage, and love, where good meets evil, written for children, The Harry Potter series is clearly an abomination towards the Christian communities.
/s - 1jaxstate1, on 09/29/2008, -4/+23Where is "The Bell Curve Theory"? But that was a nice read. +1
- CCUboogernjit, on 09/29/2008, -5/+23This is the list the GOP uses
- omgosh, on 09/29/2008, -0/+18"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims" - Aristotle
- slide23, on 09/29/2008, -10/+28Please stop posting stupid slide shows!
- W16three, on 09/29/2008, -2/+20I like turtles!
- inactive, on 09/29/2008, -0/+18"An anemone or clematis plant's juice can cause a rash. When pruning them, it's a good idea to wear gloves."
-Roy Campbell -
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