Only Your Librarian Knows For Sure

Have you ever read a banned book? Sure you have, you probably just didn't know it.

This list of the most banned books crossed my desk two years ago as a book survey. Feel free to try it yourself. All opinions and comments are welcomed.

"If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven't gotten around to reading it yet, *** it."

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee***
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque***
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck***
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene***
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner ***
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines ***
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola***
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle***
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

I had no idea. I feel so wicked. Not.

Giller Prize longlist 2008

The jury selected 15 titles out of 95 books, submitted by 38 publishers from every region of Canada. The longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize includes three former winners of the Canadian prize for literary fiction. The list will be winnowed down to a shortlist of five on October 7. The winner will be announced on November 11.

Award-winning author and previous Giller Prize winner Margaret Atwood; Liberal MP, Foreign Affairs critic and author Bob Rae; and renowned international journalist, professor and author Colm Toibin comprised the 2008 jury.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the prize.
From a highly competitive field, the Scotiabank Giller jury has selected the following titles for this year’s longlist:




David Adams Richards for The Lost Highway






David Bergen for The Retreat






Joseph Boyden for Through Black Spruce






Austin Clarke for More






Anthony De Sa for Barnacle Love, short stories






Emma Donaghue for The Sealed Letter






Marina Endicott for Good to a Fault






Steven Galloway for The Cellist of Sarajevo






Rawi Hage for Cockroach






Kenneth J. Harvey for Blackstrap Hawco






Patrick Lane for Red Dog, Red Dog






Pasha Malla for The Withdrawal Method, short stories






Paul Quarrington for The Ravine






Nino Ricci for The Origin of Species






Mary Swan for The Boys in the Trees





Of the longlist, the jury writes:

“These fifteen books vary widely in technique, in setting, and in tone — from the historical to the contemporary, from the comic to the satiric to the tragic, from the local to the international. Nothing unites them but the jury's belief in their accomplishment: each contributes something fresh, original, thoughtful, or vital to the practice of fiction.”
The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards $50,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $5,000 to each of the finalists. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.
October 7, 2008 Shortlist Announcement
November 11, 2008 Gala Evening and Winner Announcement
---

I have read The Boys in the Trees***** by Mary Swan. I have started The Cellist of Sarajevo and have Cockroach by Rawi Hage, Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden, and The Lost Highway by David Adam Richards in my TBR pile.

If you have reviewed any of these books let us know by commenting or sending me a link to your review.
So, which have you read? Which do you plan to read? Have any interesting information about any of them or their authors?

Booker Prize shortlist 2008

The Man Booker Awards shortlist for fiction

Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger

Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture

Amitav Ghosh for Sea of Poppies

Linda Grant for The Clothes on Their Backs

Philip Hensher for The Northern Clemency

Steve Tolz for A Fraction of the Whole

I am half way through A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Tolz and it's one of a kind I must say. And a first novel. I still plan to read the Sebastian Barry book and Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs. From the longlist I have read A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif and The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser, both excellent stories. I will read From A to X because I fell in love with John Berger's writing the first time I read him. Then Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and possibly the rest of them.

Quoted from The International Herald Tribune:

John Sutherland, who has twice been a judge for the Man Booker literary prize, wrote in The Financial Times that "If The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it."

Oh oh.

The first chapter of Rushie's book is available to read online at the New York Times
here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/chapters/first-chapter-enchantress.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

The Man Booker Prize winner will be announced on October 14th, 2008.

*****
I follow all books awards for the kind of fiction I read simply because it alerts me to books I might not hear about otherwise. So many novels come out each month that it's hard to keep up. Some get a lot more press than others too, those are the ones you hear about constantly. I never relinquish my own instincts though because who knows better than me what I like. In writing reviews my own tendency is toward shortness, almost a brief synopsis and a rating. Unless it's a reviewer's copy because publicity agents expect more. But I enjoy not knowing about anything that's going to happen in a story when I read. I want all the little shocks, twists, and heartbreaks to surprise me, like life itself. The problem with that is you can't waste time reading anything and everything and you can't totally trust a review. Reviewers can be paid to do it, may know the author, have an agenda of their own, such as advancing their reputations, (or blogs), or even have books of their own to promote. They can be uninformed about some subjects or elements of a story or about the author's body of work and the kind of writing they're reviewing. And like all of us reviewers are imperfect and have biases, for or against certain subjects, styles etc.

I judge by who wrote it, what else have they written, where does the story take place, what time period, which culture etc. In other words, will it interest me. Until my personal alarm goes off. Terms such as "bestselling" ,"gritty", "saga", "romance", "sexual obsession", or blurbs with exclamation marks are warning signs for me. They may not mean absolutely not but they give me serious pause. I'm sure we all have some and they'll be different for each one of us. I have read novels when all I knew was " it's about elephants","Vanessa Redgrave really liked it", or "it's written by a medical doctor". I was not disappointed. " The critics tore it apart" will make me more curious. A close friend who knows your tastes is nice to have but not always available to read and screen out the dreck for you.Ultimately any review, or blurb, is still only "one man's opinion". The trick is to find reviewers with similar tastes, keep an open mind, then trust yourself.

If you have any opinions on any of these books, we'd like to hear from you.

RIP Alexandr Solzhenitzyn

RIP Александр Исаевич Солженицын

Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitzyn, Nobel Prize-winning writer, teacher, soldier, and Soviet dissident, has died on August 3, aged 89, in Russia. He is buried in the Donskoi Monastery, Moscow. He was born in Kislovodsk, Russia in 1918. His famous works include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, based on his time in a labour camp, and The Gulag Archipelago, for which he was exiled in 1974. He went to prison for making negative comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970.

From my library:

Whether you read them for the history or the psychological terror of the times, these are well worth your time. He published dozens of books, including fiction, non-fiction, short stories, poetry, essays, reflections, and an autobiography.

A friend at LibraryThing tells me:

"His documentary novel, The First Circle, will be re-released next spring with an additional 6-8 chapters included which were originally censored out by the former USSR. I'm surprised, considering The First Circle's blatant condemnation of the former Soviet gov't (allegorizing the regime as one of Dante's first circles of Hell?) was ever published in the former Soviet Union in the first place; so these half dozen or so re-inserted chapters must be incredibly damning and should make for an even more compelling read. Can't wait till it comes out.

Lola