Banned Books?

[fancying_fantasy]

Where can I get a list of the Most-Banned Books? An author I like was talking about being on the list this year, and I'm just curious to know who else is.

[Rane Longfox]

The what?

[Nesacat]

Might be different for different countries though. I know the list of banned books here but they are not banned in neighbouring countries and the list itself tends to change from year to year. Sometimes even day to day and it's mostly illogical. For instance one of the banned books on the most recent list is a history of the Chinese teapot and another is on management letter writing. The mind boggles.

[littlemissattitude]

A good place to start is the American Library Association page promoting Banned Books Week, which they sponsor every year in September. Scroll down for links to lists of books and authors which have been challenged. I don't know if you'll find links to banned books in other countries, but there is a lot of information there.

[Nesacat]

Thanks LittleMiss. The site is very helpful indeed. There's been a move here recently trying to get the Government to give valid reasons for the banning of books since it all seems very random and illogical right now with books not being banned one week and banned the next. The matter was recently brought up in Parliament but was very neatly side-stepped. But there is growing concern and awareness now about the matter and a similar site over here might be another good thing to do. Thanks again.

[fancying_fantasy]

Thanks LittleMiss, that really helped for what I wanted. I can understand why some books are ban, even though the reasoning is still a little warped, but others it is utter ridiculousness why they are banned.

[littlemissattitude]

I'm glad I could help you both. I only knew about that site because our libraries around here make a big deal about Banned Books Week and I picked up a bookmark with the site listed on it. But, I've been following the topic for a long time, probably ever since I realized when I was in about junior high school that all of my friends' parents had a bookshelf full of books that my friends were not allowed to touch. Sometime after that I discovered that there were people who tried to ban books on a larger scale, and that just did not make sense to me...and still doesn't. This is probably because my parents never tried to limit what I read.

Admittedly, sometimes the stuff I read made them a little nervous...they weren't all that thrilled that I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice when I was in junior high, for instance...but they never tried to stop me from reading anything. The library ladies were not so permissive, but when they wouldn't let me check something out because it was too "adult", I'd just wait until it was reshelved and I'd sit and read it in the library.

[littlemissattitude]

I really hate to double post, but after I finished writing that last post, I remembered a book I read several years ago that is on topic here.

Girls Lean Back Everywhere, by Edward DeGrazia (1992, Random House) is a legal history of literary censorship, written by the attorney and law professor who successfully defended Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in front of the US Supreme Court. It is a big book, and quite scholarly, but it is also quite readable and very worthwhile. It looks at the stories of the censorship troubles of writers (mostly, and some other artists of various kinds) such as James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Lenny Bruce. While some of the cases looked at were obscenity cases at the time, all the works that are looked at are freely available now (at least in the US), and so I doubt that I really need to put a "mature readers" disclaimer here.

For Nesacat...I think this is really applicable to the situation you describe, as often these books were, at some point, fully legal in some places but banned in others. I am interested to know, in your country, if most of these bannings are for reasons of "morality" or are more political in nature, having to do with trying to keep social and political ideas the government doesn't like out of the hands (and the minds) of the people. If you don't mind my asking.

[pyan]

Wikipedia has a section on the subject - but read the "Talk Page" notes, as well.

List of banned books - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Nesacat]

The banning of books here really makes no sense at all. And the whole situation is made worse by the fact that more than one agency has a hand in the matter and no one knows what anyone else is doing.

For instance all Karen Armstrong's books are banned here now (last month). Before that several were available in many bookstores. Her book on Islam was banned because it featured an angel on the cover. Khalil Gibran's Prophet was banned because of the title. Salman Rushdie's book Midnight's Children just got banned causing a mad scramble in Universities and Colleges that had it on their reading list.

The really daft part of the whole scenario is that stores like Borders and Kinokuniya manage to slip past the censors by NOT bringing their shipments in through the ports. The Customs officials at the ports seem to decode at ramdom what is allowed or not. By some stretch I can understand books being banned on a social or religious ground but to ban books because of their titles is a bit much. Borders and Kinokuniya fly or courier their books in and they pay agents to pick up the books. This of course explains why their books cost a little more.

The country has been independent for close to 50 years and it is the age of the Internet. Seems to be that banning books is becoming increasingly futile when you can probably download it along with just about anything and everything else imaginable. It's never made any sense at all this censorship of books and because I buy so many of mine abroad I never really thought about it until I got involved with Silverfish Books. We had a whole box of Gibran's books confiscated at the port. There are whole warehouses of books stuck at ports. The books are left to literally rot. Seems to me that it's time to stop treating people as if they were likely to hit the streets and riot as soon as they read anything above the level of Enid Blyton and stop banning books.

Among the books currently banned are books of children's bedtime tales, nursery rhymes, Disney, Chick Lit, etc. For the life of me and no matter what angle I looked at it I could not find a reason for most of them being banned. There's a little more about it on the Silverfish site of you like. I am sorry for the long rant but this whole concept of banning the written word really gets to me.

[Joel007]

Well, the world's most banned book would be The Bible. Although if you read it cover to cover you'll miss out the important bits by having your eyes glazed over from the historical documentation

The Harry Potter books have been banned in various places for some reason. And I'm sure there are plenty of pornographic, racist, torture related, or just plain evil writing which is hard to get hold of.
If you're looking for books banned for no good reason, look to any dictatorship.