Happy Banned Books Week
What's the last banned book you've read? Because one of the pleasures of Banned Books Week (instituted by the American Library Association in 1982) is the fantastic booklists you get to contemplate -- of titles that someone somewhere sometime felt moved to hide from you -- happy reading memories and still unread wonders just waiting to jazz up a to-be-read pile that may have gotten too one-note or work-oriented. Like the one I'm going to cut and paste below of 42 books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course's Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century -- all of which have been banned or challenged by someone somewhere: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 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 Vladmir Nabokov Of Mice and Men by John