110 Banned Books

Thanks to Jay, here’s a list of 110 banned books. I’m jumping in late on this game, but what the hell. Bolded items are books I’ve read, italicized items are books I’ve read partially.

¹ Indicates I first read it in college
² Indicates I first read it before I was 16 years old (actually, a lot of them I read before I turned 12)
³ Indicates that I think it’s one of the greatest books ever written

I’m so grateful my mom and dad allowed me to read anything I wanted. Well, OK, not anything, they did make an effort to hide actual pornography from me, though I found Dad’s stash of Playboys when I was 10 years old (and was completely horrified by the sight of pubic hair). Then when I was around 17 years old and they realized I was going to go to college some time soon and live on my own, they started freaking out about my movie and book choices, which was really funny because man, talk about the horse having long bolted from this particular barn… Here’s an example: I was reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind one day, and this particular edition’s cover was a close-up of some old painting featuring a nude girl sleeping. Very tasteful, very pretty. And my dad freaked out. “Mummy, come see what your daughter is reading!” he yelled. They didn’t stop me from reading the book, though, just gave me a really dirty look and fussed over the “indecent” cover.

And really, if they’d actually read Perfume, I think the cover would’ve been the least of their objections.

Anyway, enough babbling, on to the list!

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain^{2, 3}
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes^{2, 3}
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights³
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain^{2, 3}
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift^{1, 3}
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer¹
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman¹
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli¹
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank²
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert^{2, 3}
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker²
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne¹
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy^{2, 3}
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell^{2, 3}
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell^{2, 3}
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee^{2, 3}
#31 Analects by Confucius¹
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck^{2, 3}
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx¹
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#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 Mitchell²
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx¹
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding^{2, 3}
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey^{2, 3}
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller^{2, 3}
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger^{2, 3}
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison¹
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe¹
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#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 Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes¹
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath¹
#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^{2, 3}
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov³
#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
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle¹
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder²
#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
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#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^{2, 3}