Follow up to "Banned Books Week"

Throughout history, more and different kinds of people and groups of all persuasions than you might first suppose, who, for all sorts of reasons, have attempted--and continue to attempt--to suppress anything that conflicts with or anyone who disagrees with their own beliefs.

In his book Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, Nat Hentoff writes that "the lust to suppress can come from any direction." He quotes Phil Kerby, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times, as saying, "Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second."

I was surprised to see how few of these books I have read. I notice that many of them are books that are intended by marketers for "junvenile" or teenage readers, like those by Judy Blume. This is probably why I haven't read all that many of them. Not that there's anything wrong with them. I have read a few books oriented toward that demographic, long after I was a member of it, and many of them are very good. I was kind of expecting to see a book called I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. But then his The Chocolate War is on the list, which I haven't read. I Am the Cheese is a book that I first read in high school and was deeply troubled by it. In fact, memories of it haunted me for years. Many years later I found a copy of it in a used book store and finally re-read it. It is still very disturbing, by what is revealed in the first-person narrative as well as the third-person bits of information that intersperse and end it. I don't know how Cormier could have conceived such a plot, or what possibly inspired him, except that he must be a writing genius.

So here is a list of the ones from the big list that I have read. One other comment: a book-loving aunt of mine gave me Tom Sawyer for Christmas when I was five years old, and I pretty much grew up reading it--multiple times.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (own)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (read but don't own--same with many Steinbeck novels)
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling (own first three)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (read but don't own)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (own the whole series)
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (own)
The Witches by Roald Dahl (own a few by Dahl)
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (read but don't own)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (own--also The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell)
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell (own)
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (read but don't own)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (own)

Also on this list was Flowers for Algernon, which I'm pretty sure I have here somewhere, but I've never read it. (Why would I want a library full of books I've already read?) And I may actually own some of the books listed, but I haven't seen them in so long I've forgotten if they are actually mine or not. I have a lot of books. It's hard to keep track of them all. I also have several books by authors who are on this list for some other book.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, the annual event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.

Banned Books Week (BBW) celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one's opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

quotes taken from the American Library Association website