Spitball Army

There was a flurry of tweets this morning about banned books, including one written by the staff at the New York Review of Books, mentioning that “we’re in the business of getting banned books back in your hands.”  I’ve been trying to increase my reading quotient lately, so this got me wondering just how many of these so-called “banned books” I’ve read in my lifetime, and which ones I might like to tackle next.

This led me to a page on the website of the American Library Association that lists just some of the probably thousands of books whose content has been challenged.  Specifically, these are the books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” that have been criticized for language, sexual references, violence, or for just being, well, too imaginative.  A partial list of the ones I have yet to read (no gasping, please):

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I’m reading this right now)
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The ALA list of the Top 100 Novels is a really terrific list of books that is worth investigating for any reason.  This seemed as good a reason as any.