There was an important week a couple of months ago and I missed it. It was September 30 through October 6: Banned Books Week. It is a week set aside to celebrate our freedom to read. Although what I’m reading presently would not be on any banned book list ( a book about the building of the Erie Canal and a biography of H.L. Mencken), my book shelves are loaded with books that have been banned. Some of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read have been previously banned. Take a look at the following list, all great books:
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (I count these first two as the best novels since 1900)
1984 & Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Women in Love, Sons & Lovers, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
Some of the books that have landed on the “do not read” lists of the puritanical among us even include some novels that might surprise you:
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
There will always be religious zealots with blinders on their eyes, the bible thumpers and the holier-than-thou types, that attempt to remove from the reading lists of the rest of us those books they puritanically deem to be “bad.” I pity them.