A list of the top 110 banned books in the US.
Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the books you’ve read part of.
(I added comments after the books I read as an extra.)

#1 The Bible — Read this to help me in my whole spiritual path type of thing… Read the Book of Mormon and a few other books on religion as well.
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — Hasn’t everyone read this?
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes — Read part of it because it’s famous, but I got bored shortly into it.
#4 The Koran — Read parts of it (in Arabic and English) while doing Arabic Training.
#5 Arabian Nights — Same as above.
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain — Another one that everyone reads in school… or so I thought.
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift — Read in school
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer — School
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne — School
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe — School
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank — Read this on my own before having to read it for school. Very heartfelt and emotional when you consider the events.
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens — School
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo — I loved the play and music so much I had to read this.
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker — I read it for it’s fandom, but never really liked the vampire books.
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin — I did an essay on Benjamin Franklin in high school. Used this as material.
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne

#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — I’ve always loved Steinbeck. I’ve read his books on my own and in class.
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon — I believe I read this in high school…not sure.
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin — I need to finish this book someday.
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce — Read it in school, but I liked it.
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell — School
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell — School… gotta love the big brother idea.
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — Another one that I think everyone has read in school.

#31 Analects by Confucius — Oahh… sounds interesting. Need to read.
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck — School and pleasure.
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway — Pleasure
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — Pleasure
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell — School
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx — Did a report on Karl Mark in my history class.
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding — Read part of it for it’s fandom, but never got into it.
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway — School and pleasure.
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — I started to read this, but can’t recall if I finished it. Pleasure.

#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak — Fandom stuff, never finished.
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey — School
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger — Been meaning to read this for its fandom…
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke — College History Course required us to read chapters of this book and write on it.
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck — Pleasure
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson — Favorite book on list… read below for reasons.
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler — Read purely for personal interests.
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl — Jr. High if I recall correctly.
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — Read for it’s controversial views. Some of it still give me a creepy feeling.
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George — Read in Jr. High for a Children’s reading award list. I thought it was a good book. (I still read those award list books.)
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle — Currently reading this actually. (I was looking up metaphysics a while ago when I read the whole AF Teleportation idea. Found this.) It’s online here.
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder — Jr. High… did a report on it.
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin,
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud — Psychology class.
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess — This book still gives me the creeps.

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin — I think my father told me to read this, but I never finished.
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes — Read in school. Sad ending…

There is no way those can all be banned… I read almost all the bolded ones in school.

I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia in Jr. High; this is the first book I ever cried to. I find myself thinking about this even now, and I read it in 7th grade! I think this is on the top of my list of greatest books I’ve ever read… and if you haven’t read it yet I highly urge you to do so. If not, at least read the Summary from sparks notes. Just be warned, it gives away the story, and you’ll miss a lot in the reading. So only read that if you are sure you’ll never read the book itself. Btw… it’s banned for “Occult/Satanism and Violence.”

I read all of the Hemingway and Steinbeck in high school. A lot of the others I started but lost interest or read chapters for essays done in school. Either way, I can’t believe the Hemingway and Steinbeck books are on there. They’re classics! I was assigned some of those books in class. While it was six years ago, I still can’t believe they were banned….

Other Books that are challenged… You can read the reasons for all the books, including the ones above here. (You’ll love this):
– How to Eat Fried Worms. For: Inappropriate for age… hell I read it when I was in Elementary school.. *shrugs*
– Where’s Waldo. For: Nudity (WTF?!?)
– Adventures of Tom Sawyer. For: Offensive Language, Racism. Omg! Lock your children up in the basement if you want to keep them from offensive language. As for racism.. isn’t the point to educate our children so they can see past this?
– Mommy Laid an Egg. (Explains where children came from using children’s own drawings.) Why? Sexual themes. Bleh
– On my Honor (I read this… about two friends, and one drowns) Offensive Language.
Sheesh, the list goes on and on… Tiger Eyes (Judy Blume), Carrie (Stephen King), Are you god? It’s me, Margret (Judy Blume), The Anarchist Cookbook (well, duh?), The Giver (Lois Lowry), The Harry Potter Series(damn witches! lmao), and more and more… That’s nuts…

Ok, whatever. I know this, for sure. If I have children, they’ll read Hemingway and Steinbeck and whatever other books I choose. They live in this world to, and they’ll be exposed to the world whether I choose it or not. I’m not going to deny them great literature because some psycho decided it was ‘bad’.

Anyways, that’s my rant. I still think this is stupid…

Other links on the topic:
ALA’s list of 100 most frequently banned books.
OCLC top 1000 Banned books.

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ December 11, 2004 1:29 am