BTW, my kids can read whatever they want to. I encourage them to check out the books in the grownup’s area as well as the kids books.
IMHO, it seems like a book has to have substance to get banned. Banal crap tends to be ignored whatever the content. So what some would call a banned book list is what I call a recommended reading list.
Funny to see this list, especially since I’ve been on a classic reading kick for a couple of months. I have sinned by reading the following books in the last three months:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
(Actually, I read a two book set of Twain’s stuff, both novels and short stories. Surely I’m going to hell.)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee <-- Finished this one yesterday. Didn’t feel like evil as I read it, but for some reason I have this sudden urge to go on a rampage and torture small animals.
Or maybe not.
From here.
Where’s Waldo?
AUTHOR: Martin Hanford
ISBN: 0763619205
Plot Summary: A picture book, where you look closely to find…oh, hell, everyone knows what this is! Sheesh!
Complaints: Nudity (Yes, I am serious.)
Although most of us are searching for Waldo among the crowd in the illustrations of this book, some folks have discovered something else entirely–purportedly a topless sunbather. The book was challenged by libraries in Michigan on the grounds that “on some of the pages there are dirty things.”
Solonor Says Ban It Because: Seriously. This lowers the bar so far that I could get ANYTHING banned!
Links:
Alibris-Banned Books: Children’s
What? Do they think some kid is going to notice a tiny, cartoon topless subather amost the literally 10,000 people in a single book and start masterbating to the sight?
Obvously the person who complained was the ONLY person to ever find this, because everyone else was trying to find waldo, and frquently getting thrown off by people with the same color pattern clothing.
Well, that would be a good reason for banning Mein Kampf. Granted, the content is extremely objectionable, but more importantly, I’ve been told it’s very poorly written.
And this is so bad because?
Not that I’m a fan of bugs or eating them, but I imagine that most kids won’t want to eat any more worms once they’ve eaten one.
A lot of these books kids have to read for novel studies. This is insane.
Hey, don’t ask me. I’m just doing my best to guess what the world-view of an uptight, semi-literate chicken-little parent might be.
I’ve been reading the banned books this past two weeks also. “Flowers For Algernon” had the least amount of sex in it possible! Charly attempted to have sex with Miss (forgot her name- his old teacher) but had panic attacks and was unable to complete the act. He later was successful with the artist-neighbor after a couple of tries. The descriptions were very brief and circumspect. I found it hard to believe that anyone could have been offended by the scenes.
The “4 new flavors” package of Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans includes earthworm. I didn’t try it myself, but the kids tell me it does indeed taste like earthworm.
During summer vacation, my 12 year old accompanies me on my dog-walking and petsitting rounds. While we drive to our clients’ homes, we listen to books on tape. It’s an agreeable way to get diverse literature into a boy who would otherwise confine himself to science fiction (though we love SF, too!). This summer we listened to “To Kill a Mockingbird”. It took us about three weeks to get through it, and our family had the most interesting suppertime conversations. (Isn’t it great to see the cogs turning in your kid’s head?) I can’t imagine depriving him of a book just because it uses the word “nigger” – especially when its context is socially and historically correct!
A few decades ago, (OK, maybe more than a few…) the Catholic church, which ran most of the province of Quebec, maintained an INDEX of books unsuitable for impressionable youths and persons of a delicate moral character. You had to be in like a University Litterature program to be alllowed to check them out. Being found in possession of one of these books would create a scandal, get you thrown out of the best schools, shame your parents. Man, it was amazing, the whole society bought into it…
The index featured such perverts as Proust, Camus, Voltaire, Molliere, Baudelaire (Gasp, one of the worst… :rolleyes: ).
As a result, any self respecting lad had to be familiar with all of these, had to have read them if he were to be deemed a real man, and be ready to discuss them while sneaking a smoke around the corner. There was a thriving trade in illicit paperback classics.
Now, they were teaching “Les Fleurs du Mal” in my grade 11 French class, and most of the guys in my class didn’t even bother to read it… 
My extremely conservative, aristocratic, full-feldged catholic priest, French litterature teacher in grade 10 said that doing away with the index was the worst blow to litteracy struck in the province, and the best way to ensure that generations of kids never read these books.
So we need more fundies protesting on TV, book burnings, enraged parents, scandal, controversy, breathless TV news reports, etc. about the terrible things that can be found in litterature… the evil immoral horrors of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Hemmingway, etc.etc.
Maybe it’ll make the kids read again…
Well, obviously, you’re not a Fundamentalist parent. 
This book has a lot of talk about “witchcraft” and the “paranormal”, which gets a lot of books on the Fundamentalist banned list. In fact, pretty much all of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s works would be considered subversive by that crowd. In the Green-Sky Trilogy, for instance, not only do the people have “spiritual powers”, but they encourage their teenagers to have premarital sex and require them to take birth control! Shocking! :eek:
Because most of the bomb recipies in The Anarchist’s Cookbook don’t actually work.
Er … so I’ve heard.
Yeah, I don’t remember any dramatic sex in the unedited novel, and I’m pretty sure I would have. I certainly remember (from 11th grade) some bits from The Assistant (Malamud) and Pornoy’s Complaint (Roth). Those were assigned readings, by the way. Can you believe, a public school English teacher!?!
I was aware of one book in the high school library that was restricted, but you could see it if a teacher gave you permission. It was Ars Amatoria (Ovid) in Latin, which was not a well-known language, if you get my drift.
Oh, well…
You mean like making Naplam out of Gasoline and Orange Juice?
Oh, wait. That was Fight club.
My understanding of the situation is that the recipes from the book were replaced in the movie by others that had no chance of working. Gasoline and orange juice, for instance, is used in the movie. The only one I remember from the book (it’s been a while) is gasoline and paraffin, which never works for the narrator anyway.As for the others mentioned in the book, I can’t recall what they were or whether they’d work.
And the recipes in James and the Giant Peach do?
Can I just take a moment to revel in the glory of my first threadspotting?
My favorite book as a pre-teen Summer of My German Soldier comes in at #89.
The sequel Morning is a Long Time Coming didn’t make it.
God - I loved those books.