That’s what I was thinking. Remember what it was that got every student at Hogwarts to subscribe to The Quibbler? It was the fact that the school banned it.
Of course, it could also be some viral thing to get people thinking about banned books. Isn’t Banned Book Month coming up soon?
Nope. It’s probably fake. But that’s what happens on the Internet.
It changed a lot by groups; the group that did those exchanges was what we called “pillow students” in 10th and 11th grades. The exchanges continued for years, I know some are still exchanging books and we’ve been out of high school for 23 years.
In Spain, students get grouped up and the students in each group spend pretty much every single class together. Teachers move from a classroom to another, unless they have special requirements (art, labs, gym). “Pillow students” were those of us assigned as “filler” to a group that had been seeded by students whose class choices were known as being linked to disruptive students. For example, more than half of my 10th grade class were students who’d chosen French as second language; those usually were from villages, had studied French in primary school and were just waiting to turn 16 so they could leave school and get jobs. 25 French students in 10th grade; only 6 in 11th…
Pillow students got selected because the teachers figured we’d get the same grades, good or bad, whether we got put in a disruptive environment, in a dumpster, or in NASA’s server room.
So we were, by definition, a bunch of weirdos…
On the other hand, in 5th grade I got sent to the corner to stare at the wall, for lying on my “The Book I Read This Summer” essay. The teacher didn’t believe I’d read Delibes’ Camino (whose main character was a bookish boy my age; one of the characteristics of Delibes’ writing is that he writes in the 1st person and manages to sound very much like that person would). Of course, since the only Delibes he’d read was “5 Hours With Mario,” which is a damn brick, he didn’t know Delibes can be easy to read if you pick the right book.
While I do think that webpage is a fake with 99.999% security, and while we did read several of the books listed for class (for exampleAnimal Farm, History of Philosophy, 12th grade), none of them was or is available on the children’s section of the local public library. Since minors can’t borrow from outside that section, anybody not old enough to vote wouldn’t have been able to borrow those books from the library.
That’s the point I think: that it isn’t quite believable, but it gets people thinking.
Did the kid actually say it was a Catholic school? I missed that. I figured it was an extreme Fundamentalist Christian private school in which case most of these would make more sense.
Some charitable soul with a wicked sense of humor donated a bunch of boxes full of books to my Catholic school library long before I started reading. I doubt the librarian even knew what was in there, because instead of getting rid of some of these books (definitively not suitable for minors) they stacked them in boxes in the back room*, where I found them.
Since I was a voracious reader, and very careful with the books, the librarian would let me take the books home (this was the school library, not a public one, books couldn’t be checked out). After some time it was just based on trust, I took whatever books I wanted and just returned them and put them back when I finished. The librarian didn’t know what I had taken.
And so, I got to read the complete works of Marquis de Sade when I was 14. 
He said the books were banned because they said negative things about the Catholic Church. I doubt that would be a big problem for most truly strait-laced fundamentalist schools.
While not banned at my junior high school per se, I was asked to take Life, the Universe, and Everything home and not bring it back because of the use of foul language. (I had the British published version in which the word “fuck” was used fairly prolifically. In the American version, this was substituted with various other terms like “kneebiter”, and the Rory was awarded for the most gratuitous use of the word “Belgium.”) The school did prohibit Orwell’s 1984 because of the (rather tame) sexual interchange between Winston and Julia, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn due to the use of the term, “nigger.” Rather than being a well thought out program of suppression it was more of a reflexive response to anything anyone might find offensive.
However, the story cited by the o.p. seems, well, unlikely to the extreme. Why would the kid keep a stack of prohibited books in his locker rather than distributing from his house, like most kids did with porn and the Anarchists’ Cookbook in the pre-Internet era. Indeed, many of the books that are listed are in the public domain and can be found on the Internet. It sounds like someone’s censorship fantasy to me.
Stranger
While I don’t particularly care whether someone reads de Sade at 14 or 40, I’d personally just have to wonder why one would read them at all. Skimming through, I got the sense more that he was trying to be as filthy as he could rather than trying to write something kinky or erotic. Doesn’t really seem like pleasure reading.
I remember reading this several months ago. I became pretty convinced that it was a fake.
Were you ever 14?
I don’t care much for Sade now, but this was pre-internet, curiosity about sexuality, and knowing I was doing something that would get me in an metric assload of trouble if I got caught did the trick.
Stephen King as I recall once responded to a school library banning his books by thanking them for ensuring that the kids would read him.
True or not, I don’t find it even slightly surprising that a school library would ban any or all of those books, for any number of reasons. No stranger than banning the Wizard of Oz because Dorothy escapes by her own efforts rather than praying and waiting for God to solve her problems for her.
There’s also what I was told as a child; that aliens exist, but are demons.
I remember thinking it was awesome to read Sade because it was assigned in a college lit class. It was the only time I got aroused while doing homework. (Yeah, Misfortunes of Virtue!)
Yeah, but the Romance section at any book store could pretty easily be retitled the Erotic Literature section and there’s no age limit to buying books. Seems easy enough to just go for that.
But they’re so…cheesy. I know, there’s something wrong with me when the thought of reading a bodice ripper makes me shudder and want to puke and the thought of the Marquis de Sade gets me really hot.
You can’t check books out of the regular sections of the library until you can vote in Spain?! Yikes. I remember getting a “real” library card (not just a children’s card) when I was 8.
Really? Are you comparing Barbara Cartland to Sade? Have you read either?
Also, what Freudian Slit said.
I love it. If you want to make something hugely popular: Ban it.
All the right wing types who get angry about no prayer in school or ten commandments up on courthouse walls should be thanking the government for all that great press. If banning something doesn’t make it sexy, nothing will.
Dubious at best. I don’t think its real.
Nobody, least of all me, is surprised by fundie schools banning books. But Catholic schools generally don’t. One reason why I think this is a fake.