Swap Blog

Big Orange Michael recently had a post about Sept 24th - Oct 1st being - read a banned book week - (Full post here) Michael challenges his readers to participate with him and read a banned book this week. I personally will leave that option up to you, but I will say that some of the books on the list are very good, and some are really terrible.

That, the nature of some of the books on the list, is what I want to hit on here. First of all I have a belief that good books will rise to the top long term. Short term society may run to an from pop lit, but long term readership will find/ rediscover good literature. I personally think that it is perfectly fine to write, publish, read, etc a book that I do not like, but just because a book is controversial or popular does not make it good. With that said, I am not bit surprised to see that both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer remain on the list of “challenged” books. Most people know why, and I will not waste everyone’s time recounting the arguments both for and against the books. That is one long running debate which I will not get into, at least not today. No what I want to look at is some of the other books that are challenged regularly, pointing out just a few that are just down right stupid to even challenge -

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - possibly the SECOND most boring book ever behind Ethan Frome, but definitely not worthy of being banned, except maybe due to boredom
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - WHAT???
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - WHAT??? who tries to ban Steinbeck
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - WHAT???
but dumbest of all -Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford - WHO IN THE WORLD WOULD TRY TO BAN WALDO…I mean come on and pick a book that is at least offensive to SOMEONE!!!

My point is that some of the books on the list are really good, but are still challenged, simply because of their topic. Again controversy or shock value does not make a book good, but a good book can be both controversial and shocking. Long term good books should be read, regardless of topic, and inferior literature should be left to dye in the wastebin of history, not due to content but due to inferior text and quality. This, the decay of inferior books, should be accomplished simply by reader selection over time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Current / General, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.