Banned Books

[Number6]

I like to read books. Most of the books I read are mysteries and science fiction but occasionally I'll include non-fiction as well as classics. There is a movement in this country to ban or limit access to certain books that offends the sensibilities of certain, mainly Christian-Nationalists, people. While I don't approve of censorship I'll agree that some books shouldn't be given to children until they reach a certain age or grade level where they will be better able to handle the subject matter.

This year, I've read 69 books and will probably end up with 72 at the end of the month. Normally, I try to read at least four books a month. Because of the book bans, I've decided to start reading some of the books that have been banned. I just finished reading To Kill a Mocking Bird and IMO it's appropriate for a junior high to high school students. There is the "N" word used throughout the book but in the setting of the 1930s South it was normal for people to use that word. Rape is also mentioned but not in any detail.

I read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and again it's appropriate for junior high - high school students. It's more graphic than To Kill a Mocking Bird when it comes to rape but it also deals with incest.

Here are some of the banned books I plan on reading next year:

The Color Purple
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
The Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
Catch-22
Brave New World
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
Slaughterhouse Five
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest


Are there any banned books that you've read or plan on reading?

[gounion]

I like to read books. Most of the books I read are mysteries and science fiction but occasionally I'll include non-fiction as well as classics. There is a movement in this country to ban or limit access to certain books that offends the sensibilities of certain, mainly Christian-Nationalists, people. While I don't approve of censorship I'll agree that some books shouldn't be given to children until they reach a certain age or grade level where they will be better able to handle the subject matter.

This year, I've read 69 books and will probably end up with 72 at the end of the month. Normally, I try to read at least four books a month. Because of the book bans, I've decided to start reading some of the books that have been banned. I just finished reading To Kill a Mocking Bird and IMO it's appropriate for a junior high to high school students. There is the "N" word used throughout the book but in the setting of the 1930s South it was normal for people to use that word. Rape is also mentioned but not in any detail.

I read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and again it's appropriate for junior high - high school students. It's more graphic than To Kill a Mocking Bird when it comes to rape but it also deals with incest.

Here are some of the banned books I plan on reading next year:

The Color Purple
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
The Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
Catch-22
Brave New World
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
Slaughterhouse Five
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest


Are there any banned books that you've read or plan on reading?

Good stuff. I’ve read most of them. Most of my “reading” these days is via Audible. I do read some books, some aren’t available on Audible. I don’t do much fiction these days. Mostly history.

But for anyone who likes to listen when the reader is really good, I highly recommend To Kill a Mockingbird on Audible, ready by Sissy Spacek. There could NOT be a finer reader to read the first-person account from Scout, or Jean Louise Finch, to use her proper name. HIGHLY recommended. https://www.audible.com/pd/To-Kill-a-Mo ... wCp&sr=1-1

But now the right wants to cancel anything that has a gay or trans character anywhere in it. Shameful. They are doing their best to shove gays back in the closet.

[Number6]

Good stuff. I’ve read most of them. Most of my “reading” these days is via Audible. I do read some books, some aren’t available on Audible. I don’t do much fiction these days. Mostly history.

But for anyone who likes to listen when the reader is really good, I highly recommend To Kill a Mockingbird on Audible, ready by Sissy Spacek. There could NOT be a finer reader to read the first-person account from Scout, or Jean Louise Finch, to use her proper name. HIGHLY recommended. https://www.audible.com/pd/To-Kill-a-Mo ... wCp&sr=1-1

But now the right wants to cancel anything that has a gay or trans character anywhere in it. Shameful. They are doing their best to shove gays back in the closet.

I've listened to audio books driving from South Carolina to California but that was back in the 80s when they were on cassette tapes. Our library has a number of audio books on CDs which I might try. I'd probably have to digitize them so I can load the on my phone to listen to while walking. I'll have to check if the library offers a digital download of an audio book.

[ZoWie]

1. The LA library has audio books and access to streaming TV shows with some literary merit. Libraries nowadays are multimedia. Ditto in New York.

2. Your reading list is quite remarkable. The ban list is practically every book that I was encouraged to read as a late adolescent. One can easily find a common thread in why they were banned. It's not the PG-13 rated sex scenes, every kid gets harder stuff than that nightly on their cell phone. That's an excuse. It's that nearly all are about adolescents or young soldiers/veterans that have dared to question what used to be called the Protestant Ethic. This list gives a real insight into what white Republican suburbanites are really afraid of, and it's more than the Border Crisis or kids with pronouns.

It's that younger people, in the process of growing up, might reject some of the BS that the culture has tried to program them with.

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Some specifics:

Catcher in the Rye is narrated in the first person, by an adolescent who is having an almost clinical case of teenage alienation. He sees no future in the "Shut up, get a good job with a large corporation, and hobnob with people who help your career" ethic. He's getting failing grades in school, because the only class that interests him is something like English Lit (or similar... it's been a long time). He thinks about sex, since that's what adolescents do. I get the idea it's at least loosely based on a personal recollection by JD Salinger. Apparently, advising kids to think is subversive.

Clockwork Orange I read during my punk rock phase, and of course I'd already seen the flick by Kubrick, who was one of my teenage idols. It's essentially about a gang banger growing up in an alternate future where Russian culture has swept the world, but I can see how the casual approach to violence might be too reflective of what our own culture is really about for the tastes of the timid.

Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five are about the absurdity of war. One, and maybe both, has rather graphic descriptions of combat injuries. I got the idea that both were based on comedic-license exaggerated versions of the military experience in an active combat situation. One gets the idea that they made the banned list because there's a fear abroad in the land that questioning authority in wartime is subversive.

The Sun Also Rises is about the experiences of a veteran who got his balls blown off in a war, though Hemingway doesn't come right out and say so in the first paragraph like writers would now. It's a pretty good look at postwar disillusionment. The N-word, you know that "N----r" one, appears frequently in quoted dialog, since that's how people talked in that time, so nowadays people think it's racist, hence the bans. It's actually not racist, just a picture of the time in which it was written, that period when the Klan practically ran the country.

Cuckoo's Nest is kind of the Slaughterhouse Five for mental institutions. It inspired more movie plots, especially in student films, than Lord of the Flies, and that's a lot.

I actually never read Lord of the Flies, but i get the idea that it's kind of the prototypical post-nuke story about kids suddenly having to organize a self-government and reverting to tribal religion and savagery.