Hello fellow readers!
I’m quite interested in learning about banned books – a phenomenon present in many stories about totalitarianism and dystopia.
Please suggest some of your favourite banned books and please include a short (spoiler-free, if possible) description of why that book was banned.
I’m hoping to not simply receive a list of books that have been banned, but ones that you have actually read and enjoyed.
Thank you!
by cinnamonbunsmusic
6 Comments
https://progressive.org/downloads/2722/download/1179.pdf
There is a lot about this ban on the web now. At the time it was unprecedented.
Penguin sold a boxset of a dozen or so of them a few years ago, including (from memory):
Clockwork Orange
The master and marguerite
Lolita
1984
…Some Kafka
A quick google confirms that they’ve updated and have a large range:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=penguin+banned+books&t=ffip&ia=web
Keep in mind that book bans are rarely about the books that get banned. It is more often (in my experience) an attempt to control or deny people’s right to think for themselves.
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. It was banned shortly after it was published in 1928 for ‘obscenity’, because it’s about a lesbian. I found it a bit slow to start but ultimately loved it, and to me it’s particularly interesting because it’s semi-autobiographical, so I think gives an accurate depiction of the time and place it’s set in.
>I’m hoping to not simply receive a list of books that have been banned, but ones that you have actually read and enjoyed.
When I was a teenager I tried to seek out and read a lot of banned books because I thought that was where all the cool and transgressive stuff would be. To be honest, some of them just weren’t very good. Such as The Chocolate War by Cormac McCarthy, which is office drama/politics but with high school students. Reading it as a high schooler I just could not connect with a single thing that was happening because it’s meant for adults, not teens.
Here are some banned books I have liked:
* Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
* I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
* The Giver by Lois Lowry. This seems like it’s common assigned reading in schools, so it’s interesting that some places banned it.
* Looking for Alaska by John Green
* The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The ALA keeps a list of the most frequently banned books for each year along with the reasons why.
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
Anyway, one of the most challenged books of the last few years, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, is an excellent memoir and is thought provoking with regard to one’s own relationship to gender, even if you aren’t trans.