It's all over and I'm standing pretty in this dust that was a city.

This post lovingly dedicated to Dr. Kristi Williams and the late Dr. Dorothy Berkson, two women who taught me the joy and the value of reading the works of the wonderful and audacious women writers who came before us, and to Judy Blume, whose many challenged books gave me, as a little girl, characters to guide me in my growth as a woman.


Because it is Banned Books Week, and as a writer/blogger I am also an avid reader, I wanted to take a moment to point out that written words are ideas expressed in a format that can be shared with others, and that to love freedom means to recognize that ideas, as ideas, are not in and of themselves, dangerous.

When we refuse to face, as a human race, the thoughts we’ve been persuaded by in the past – sometimes with unspeakable results – we refuse to learn from our own failings. When we are too scared by that which we don’t know, that which is foreign or alien to us, to confront it, we limit not only what we might be ourselves, but frequently fail to see the humanity in others. Lastly, consideration of a thing and being or doing it are not the same; by considering the plight of others we, in turn, may avoid entering darkness ourselves.

To that end, I give you the top 100 most frequently challenged and banned “classics.” I have highlighted those I’ve read and put a little plus mark by those that were enjoyable and/or thought-provoking. Now that school for me is, as Alice Cooper so musically put it, out.for.ever! I am endeavoring to read all the rest of them. I hope you will join me.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald+
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger+
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee+
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell+
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White+
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne+
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston+
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison+
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac+
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway+
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf+
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton+
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand+
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf+
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess+
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin+ (My favorite on the list!)
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald+
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams+
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather+
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie


Also, in honor of those who fight censorship in all forms, I give you the 2001 Clear Channel memorandum of "lyrically questionable" songs, which includes Louie Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World, "Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Blowin' in the Wind, and of course, a personal fav, Nena's "99 Luft Balloons."

Enjoy!

99 Decision Street.
99 ministers meet.
To worry, worry, super-scurry.
Call the troops out in a hurry.
This is what we've waited for.
This is it boys, this is war.
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by.