September 2024 List of the Month: Our Favorite Banned Books

Hi All! In honor of Banned Books Week, which is coming up (September 22-28), our List of the month this September is devoted to Our Favorite Banned Books.

The books can have been banned in any jurisdiction worldwide, and in any specific institution (a school, a library, etc). Each participant may vote on ten titles (and add other, non-weighted titles). Please feel free to add notes, explaining any history of controversy, challenges and banning, especially if the case is not well known.

For a complete list of topics covered so far in our project, please see the new section for Lists of the Month on the Zeitgeist page

We would welcome suggestions for future lists. Please add them here, and we will keep them in mind, going forward.

Some lists which might be helpful, in providing examples.

A list of the most-commonly challenged books in the United States:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_Unit...

A list of books banned by governments worldwide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments

ALA's Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023:
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

I'm going to suggest that it's essentially impossible to know whether a book has been banned "in any jurisdiction worldwide, and in any specific institution", and so it might be wise to just turn downvoting off on this list. (I think the rule is a perfectly reasonable one, but I'm unconvinced it will be followed.)

>3 hipdeep: You make a good point. I was thinking mostly of cases where some joker might add a book for "fun," that clearly didn't fit the theme, but I can see that in many cases it would be difficult to say. I will remove that.

It's interesting (to me, anyway) how few banned books I've read, and how few of the ones I have read that I liked. Also, how little desire I have to read most of the books on the list :)

A few of the books I read in high school English class are on the list - Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, etc. I just can't put them on a list of "favourites" because I disliked them so much.

It's amazing how many of these books have been read for decades or longer without any complaints. I read a lot of these while I was still in public school. I don't think I read them for class but still… I am amazed at how fragile these people think we are. How is The Lord of the Rings a problem? I could go on but…

>6 krazy4katz: How is The Lord of the Rings a problem?

It's a problem because it involves magic.

It is also, in Tolkien's own opinion, a fundamentally Christian and Catholic work. I can imagine people objecting to the Catholicism, too (without being willing to say it out loud).

I'm among those who have read very few of these things, because fiction (other than medieval romances like The Lord of the Rings) is difficult for me. But the only reason I can see for banning most of them is that they're stupid. :-)

>4 AbigailAdams26: ... I was thinking mostly of cases where some joker might add a book for "fun," that clearly didn't fit the theme,...

Have you seen some of the books that are banned, especially in American schools? Some are seriously crazy. Where's Waldo comes to mind.

Wheres Waldo is a direct assault on American exceptionalism. Also the red stripes are clearly communist.

Grin

I think it was because there was a toplessly sunbathing woman somewhere. Like 1 mm of exposed breast. Shocking! Let's ban the whole series!

just read up (Wikipedia) on (some of the) books banned in Nazi-Germany (for featuring Jewish charakters):

-- Ivanhoe Walter Scott (read and enjoyed, among favourite authors)
-- Oliver Twist Charles Dickens (read and enjoyed, among favourite authors)
(and for other reasons):
-- The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (read in excerpts in German high school)
-- Stefan Zweig (read a lot, fiction and his observations; among favourite authors)
-- Sigmund Freud (read some of his books)
-- The Iron Heel, Martin Eden and The Jacket Jack London (don't know those three, but read lots of other stories, among favourite authors)
-- Bertolt Brecht (read lots of plays, stories and poems, among favourite authors)
The Outline of History and The World of William Clissold H. G. Wells (don't know those ones -yet - but liked his stories and films made after them)
All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque (read, and admire)
Die Gesteinigten Friedrich Forster (don't know him or his work -- yet ...)
The Story of Ferdinand Munro Leaf (love that book!)

Thank God it's over with their rule and heartlessnes!

PS: of the September List of banned books I've read 23. So there!

>7 waltzmn: I object to Catholicism loudly (comes with the territory of living in a Catholic dominated country), but I have no objections to LotR because it does not perpetuate any of the things I object to loudly :D

I loudly object to you calling LotR stupid too. And calling fiction in general stupid is already in the realm of criminal offense and jail time ;)

>8 Ennas: Agree that it is crazy, and crazy-making. I now include a Freedom of Expression column in every issue of State of the Thing. Back issues here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/State_of_the_Thing

>12 SandraArdnas: I loudly object to you calling LotR stupid too. And calling fiction in general stupid is already in the realm of criminal offense and jail time ;)

I did not call The Lord of the Rings stupid; I explicitly excepted it from the things I do not read; note that I said "fiction (other than medieval romances like The Lord of the Rings) is difficult for me." That is a specific exception for LotR (and the very small class of similar books).

If you doubt that I value LotR, I invite you to read http://balladindex.org/Ballads/JRRTSong.html, which is my 20,000 word analysis on the relationship between J. R. R. Tolkien's work and traditional folk song -- as far as I know (and, on this particular topic, I probably know more than anyone else) the most detailed examination of the topic ever written. (I'm not quite the world's greatest traditional folk song scholar, and I'm nowhere near the greatest Tolkien scholar, but overlap in that particular Venn diagram is very small. :-)

What I said was that a lot of the other banned books are stupid rather than ban-worthy. That statement I stand by. :-)

It took me a while to build my list of ten. As is common in these lists, I expect few other readers to share most of my choices. So far, the only one to be chosen by another user is Klaus Mann's Mephisto, a book long-banned in post-war Germany, but never in the US AFAIK.

>14 waltzmn: It was just humorous banter on my part, but on a serious note many, many of the greatest works of literature have been banned in one place or another for reasons often unfathomable. So, you stand corrected ;) (joking again that last part, you're free to consider Beloved, Slaughterhouse Five etc stupid, though personally I'd vote to make that a felony)

>16 SandraArdnas: It was just humorous banter on my part, but on a serious note many, many of the greatest works of literature have been banned in one place or another for reasons often unfathomable. So, you stand corrected ;) (joking again that last part, you're free to consider Beloved, Slaughterhouse Five etc stupid, though personally I'd vote to make that a felony)

This probably isn't worth pursuing, but you're not reading my statements literally enough. :-) Some books on the Wikipedia list are silly. Being silly is not reason for banning; it's a reason for ignoring. And "some" is a proper subset of "all." :-)

Most of the books I cannot judge, because they are modern fiction, and modern fiction is just flatly dull to me. Never understood it, and it's pure slog to read it. But I have autism. At least I understand what fiction is; many autistics don't. :-) That is not a condemnation of fiction; at worst, it's a condemnation of the human race for reading fiction. :-) (But I don't even believe that; fiction clearly is of great value to some people. I'm just not one of them. I could cite other instances where I have similar problems, mostly involving visual arts.)

FWIW, there are books on the list which most people probably don't care about where the ban bothers me, too -- e.g. Peter and Iona Opie's I Saw Esau. The objections to this are technically right -- it's a book of children's rhymes, and some of them are pretty rough. But that's at least part of the point: The kids are already saying these things. The adults need a reference to know what their kids have already learned! Don't ban it; learn from it!

>10 Ennas: I remember that illustration. I don’t remember a lot of other details…

>4 AbigailAdams26: I saw one title added because a library patron had "vociferously objected" to the title on display, not because it had actually been banned. Come on, now.

>2 AbigailAdams26: So, what are your thoughts on the copious lists coming out of Florida, Texas, and Utah? I've had to really pack my Banned Books Shelf (which I started for BBW years ago but maintained due to high interest and escalating insanity) and may need to expand it into a section of the store. Collected works of Sarah J Maas and Jodi Picoult, basically, plus a smattering of Charles Dickens, Bronte, Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with all the other offenders. Every time I turn around there's another list of newly banned and restricted works.
Coming from the other side, I've had some left-leaners question my carrying of Hillbilly Elegy. Nope, I don't discriminate against ANY books, not even the ones YOU don't like. Sheesh.

>17 waltzmn: I love the Opie's work. Thanks for reminding me of them. We have somewhere two books of them with children's rhymes. Why are people so afraid of words? As a child I had free access to all kind of writing, some way too adult, but I just marveled and went on to the next. My parents had no such thing as a poison-cubbord. I doubt it harmed me.

>19 BookHavenAZ:

Yeah, the persecution complex evident around some of the recent titles is a little gauche.

A "vociferous objection" does not necessarily rise to the level of a formal "challenge" and request for a ban. But, hey. Snowflakes. Whatchagonnado?

>21 Buchmerkur: We have somewhere two books of them with children's rhymes.

If by any chance you don't have their most important book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, it's definitely worth looking up. 500+ rhymes, with their histories. It's by far the best nursery rhyme book ever compiled, from a scholarly standpoint, and it is also one of the largest collections of rhymes ever put together.

Why are people so afraid of words? As a child I had free access to all kind of writing, some way too adult, but I just marveled and went on to the next. My parents had no such thing as a poison-cubbord. I doubt it harmed me.

If you want answers to that, you'll need to ask someone other than me. :-) The words I most object to are... any sort of falsehoods, the more deliberate, the worse. (A common autistic trait. I'm currently reading Erika Hammerschmidt's Born on the Wrong Planet, which points out that the only thing that reliably makes her truly furious is people who deliberately say wrong things. I have yet to meet an autistic who likes most of today's politicians.... :-p

>18 timspalding:: Then you'll love the "Where's Nipple?" series. Not out yet, but now that i've mentioned it...

>15 paradoxosalpha: I appreciated your choices and especially the explanations.

I think the ALA's "banned AND challenged" designation was always a bit suspect. If challenges are serious and constant they can amount to a ban—they scare other libraries off the book, and, depending on the library, books are often inaccessible during bans. But there's a big difference between a ban and someone filling out a challenge slip that is quickly and definitively ignored.

That, however, is a fight from the past. For several years now, we've seen a rising tide of true book bans.

>23 waltzmn: Thanks for elaborating on that point. Fascinating this outlook on writings. Everybody is born into his own hide. Besides, Platon didn't like having told stories to the children which he considered made up. The world is full of the one kind and the other, and I like the insights in different takes, as long it doesn't come along with prohibitions, when books are concerned :-). (Bear wirh my English - foreign tongue).

This month's list is definitely a thought provoking one for me. I saw some books on the list which deny COVID/promotes possibly racist ideas about COVID, some which support a right-wing leaning rhetoric; etc. I was thinking yeah, those were justifiably challenged by people. At the same time, I realized that that type of thinking is a slippery slope. So, it gave me something to think about. Regardless, I do feel that one needs to be at least aware of the line between hate speech/actively promoting misinformation in times of crisis and freedom of speech.

Let's not champion hate speech and COVID denial on a LT list.

A business making a business decision to not publish a book is not a ban or challenge. Publishers decline to publish literally thousands of books per year. Most written books are never published.

"This bigoted thing had a hard time finding a publisher" is not a banned book.

I'm pleasantly surprised at the number I have read.

I don't see how an author being "insulted" or "receiving threats" constitutes being banned or challenged.

Lord knows I've insulted a great many authors in my time.

And someone being attacked because his wife read the book? The author having a hard time finding a publisher? That's some goofy reasoning.

I added the Dr. Seuss book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, as did AbigailAdams. Some would object to that being there, because it was withdrawn by the Dr. Seuss Enterprises, not banned by a government entity, it wasn't challenged or banned.

I would make several arguments here:

First, Dr. Seuss' books have been frequently challenged, from both the "right" and "left." The ALA has him on many, many lists. Apparently the left doesn't like the depictions in If I Ran the Zoo and the alleged racial undertones of The Cat in the Hat. The right doesn't like the environmental message of The Lorax and the rambunctiousness of Hop on Pop! (Personally, I found that book a wonderful excuse to roughhouse.) Sometimes the challenges have been successful.

Sometimes, also, the challenges came from "inside the house," as it were. So, for example, a Cambridge, MA school librarian rejected a slate of Seuss books donated by Melania Trump on a visit, calling the books racist. Librarians get to make collection decisions, but having government agents making public statements about which books are "bad" is not (IMHO) consonant with free expression. If you disagree, would you approve of public librarians in some deep red state issuing official pronouncements about the horrible perversity of the books you love? Yes, libraries often promote books as good, despite being state actors. But something changes when they condemn books—especially books enjoyed by millions of their patrons.

Second, as noted by another poster, when the Seuss company withdrew the books, many libraries around the country instantly followed suit, removing the books from their shelves. Again, libraries get to make collection decisions, and weed books for various reasons, but this crosses the line for me—converting a private action into a state action. The book was on the shelves in libraries across the country and then it vanished. That's concerning.

I would add that And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is the sort of "significant work" usually protected from such challenges. It is the first book by Dr. Seuss, and a big seller at the time, unlike something like On Beyond Zebra!. Back in 2012, NPR's Morning Edition (hardly Fox News!) did a whole story on its continuing appeal ( https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-his-start-on-mulberry-... ).

Anyway, I've got all the banned Seuss books—because I have all the Seuss books. My kid knew what was wrong with every one, and with many other childhood classics. (Peter Pan's Indians, anyone?) They know it better than many adults. If you raise children right, they can make those sorts of judgments, and also experience some great books.

I don't see how an author being "insulted" or "receiving threats" constitutes being banned or challenged.

Yes. This applies only if they come from a state actor, or the state ignores the threats. So, for example, while the Satanic Verses is officially available in Turkey, the police in Sivas seem to have turned a blind eye to the attempted murder of its translator--a fire that killed 37 others. Absent that, it's not censorship.

As Tim notes, I also added And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. As someone with strong views on freedom of expression, who is also passionate about children's literature, I strongly objected to the actions of Dr. Seuss Enterprises back in 2021, and I looked (and look) with skepticism on those members of the commentariat who bent themselves into pretzels at the time, trying to pretend it wasn't a form of censorship.

I address some of this in depth in my reviews of And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, HERE; of On Beyond Zebra! HERE, and of If I Ran the Zoo HERE.

>34 AbigailAdams26: I object to some of the actions around And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, but as for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, forcing a company to publish a book is compelled speech. Companies are going to try and maintain an image and either edit books or stop publishing them if those books don't meet the standard they want to portray. Most books from that era are out of print, and have been for half a century.

yeah, Dr Seuss books are way old and really none of them should still be in print any more. Irrelevant to modern society if you ask me.

>37 MrAndrew: Well I think the Lorax is still quite relevant.

Here is a new trick. Not a "ban" per se, but still an encroachment on intellectual freedom:

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna175926 regarding Colonization and the Wampanoag Story

>39 paradoxosalpha:

It's a form of censorship, but it's also just a misunderstanding of what fiction and non-fiction are. I have no opinion on that book, but non-fiction does not mean "true." There are lots of non-ficiton books filled with falsehoods. Chariots of the Gods is non fiction! The difference between Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code isn't "true" and "false," but different approaches to the same bogus idea.

This is obviously censorship, but reading the samples, it actually seems to me to be historical fiction—a first-person retelling of historical events not unlike, say, Johnny Tremain, which is classified as fiction. I wonder how children's librarians think about this and classify such things as non-fiction.

>40 timspalding:
Looking at the book, it is a little more complicated than the article lets on. In this case, there are illustrative fictions embedded in a factual history. It's not really "historical fiction" in the customary mode, but it does have fictional elements. Nevertheless, it's published as non-fiction and its intended audience is more of a "history" or "social studies" reader than a "literature" reader.

The irritating thing is the government bigfooting over librarians, who are doubtless better informed about both the materials being shelved and the needs of the library patrons.

Edited to add: Shelving decisions aren't supposed to be judgments about the veridicality of book contents. The aims are heuristic: to put books where people who want them will be most likely to find them.

>40 timspalding: Oh I loved Holy Blood, Holy Grail and was pulled between incredulity, laughter and shock. It is amazing, where this kind of history studies pop up. In the excellent publisher series Rowohlts Monographien writes Johannes Hemleben in a Monographie about Johannes der Evangelist a very similar story line of most amazing relationships from Bible times and on. Why all prose has to be forced into rhyme, so that everything has to be connected and made to fit together, remains a puzzle to me; but it is great entertainment for sure.

When it comes to banned books, people seem to look at their own viewpoint and focus on cases where books are challenged from the other side. This can come from the left or the right.

One thing is clear, professional librarians don't like "outsiders" telling them what they should carry on their shelves or circulate.

But they don't mind being censors themselves. For well over 100 years, including all of the 20th Century, many professional librarians have scorned mass-market juvenile series books. The best-known example of this is Nancy Drew. But any books in that class is likely to be placed on "Not to be Circulated" lists that librarians share in their journals and weeding handbooks.

Of course, when they do it, it is not "banning" or "censorship" but "selection" due to limited space, funds, and a desire to provide "only the best" literature to children. This is a strong definition of gatekeeping.

Many librarians grew up reading series like Nancy Drew and don't find them to be harmful or subversive. So the libraries they run usually don't exclude those series. But even in the 1990s the San Francisco library system made U.S.-wide national news by their practice of excluding Nancy Drew.

There's a broad support for librarians as "defenders against outside challenges" to books. But when they do it, they get a pass with little scrutiny or negative impact. It is a strange situation. I suppose I understand it but that doesn't mean I like it. They don't really acknowledge their long historic role as book censors in the name of "selection" and "good reading."

Remember when we have been told not to judge a book by its cover? The librarians who excluded series boos were judging the books not on their individual qualities but on their genre (and publisher).

Despite all of this, Nancy Drew and similar series are seldom on the lists of "Banned Books." Maybe they are not "sexy" enough for someone to put them, as a series, on a list on a T-shirt or a poster.

But in a list like the topic of this post, how does one handle including an entire series. It's not that any particular volume is excluded, but listing even the core 56 would dominate a list of just a couple titles so it is not appropriate.

James

Libraries often remove "old" books too, wanting to make space for newly published books. Kind of annoying if the book you are looking for was published more than 10-20 years ago. Of course they keep some old "classics"...

>45 PawsforThought: Well, you have to get rid of something or you’ll run out of space. It makes more sense to get rid of the books that people don’t borrow (that’s the criteria, not the age itself). I’ve come across books that have been sitting on a shelf for over 20 years without being borrow a single time (and no, it’s not the kind of book people read in the library). You can’t keep that book, it makes no sense.

I’m fortunate enough to live near one of the national depositories, who keep all books forever so I can get hold of things that regular libraries would never be able to keep.

>45 PawsforThought:, I agree that library space and resources are finite and what a community library carries needs to reflect the interests of its users. In the same way, a successful bookstore will carry the books that its clients want to buy.

But when I visit a university library, there are many books that could be checked out but are maybe only consulted IN the library. How could they know that anyone has pulled the book off the shelf? An example of this is an index to a 19thC magazine that I consulted in UC Riverside. If the return slip was to be believed (ignoring computer systems), the book had not been checked out in decades.

James

>46 Keeline: Books you can only read in the library are obviously not measured in the same way and books that can be borrowed. Some libraries scan the books that have been left out on tables and carts, thus getting an indication of its use. Sometimes you can tell by the neatness of the shelf that a particular section isn’t very popular. It’s not an exact science and different libraries have different mechanisms.
University libraries have to keep the books used for courses being taught but old editions can’t be kept forever. If a textbook has had seven editions, they probably can’t keep the first four very long.

>47 PawsforThought:, I hope I was clear in my example that this was not a reference-only book that could NOT be checked out. Rather it was an item in the stacks that COULD be checked out but had not been because it is a somewhat obscure item.

The trouble is that relatively few libraries have this two-volume set, Index to the Youth's Companion by Cutts. There are no copies of the set available for sale. It is not the sort of thing that many will need. But it is something of an endangered species.

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1939190

It is not information that becomes "outdated" but it has minimal demand in a library system.

This is just one example and it is admittedly anecdotal. There have to be thousands of similar examples.

James

>48 Keeline: Well, libraries, if they’re not depositories, have to choose what to keep and not. And they will default to what people are more prone to borrow, rather than obscure things. If libraries kept all obscure books and didn’t get the new bestsellers they would have almost no patrons.
And don’t forget that books are sometimes simply lost or so damaged they can’t be repaired so have to be discarded. And if they’re no new copies of the book then they can’t be replaced either.

>45 PawsforThought:

"Well, you have to get rid of something or you’ll run out of space."

In 2018, our campus library went through a "thinning". They proposed to get rid of enough physical books to free up 7,000 square feet of floor space. My guess was that they wanted this space for a roller rink. Instead, they have added a cafe and a game room to the library. Admittedly, there is also more study space, most of which is devoted to "No Shush Zones" where students can study as loudly as they want.

They proposed to remove 5500 books from mathematics alone. I can't remember how many of those 5500 books we were able to save from the thinners, but it feels like the math shelves take up about 1/4 of the space they used to. In the 6 months immediately preceding the thinning, the library appeared to have acquired a total of 51 new math books. I think the overwhelming majority of the acquisitions for our library in 2024 are e-books. I don't anticipate the library running out of space anytime soon.

>50 cpg: Well, if they didn’t thin out they would. I have been in the unenviable position of thinning out the stacks of not one but two libraries that hadn’t had a proper weeding in over 20 years (it is normally done yearly, at least). There was literally no space left on any shelves. And so much of what was eventually weeded was things that no one was interested in, no one was reading and no one was borrowing.
I’m sorry that you felt the weeding was too heavy-handed at your library, but did you actually get a look at the list of the books that were being weeded or was the protest simply for the numbers? I can understand that numbers seem high, but it might be things that are no longer usable. One of my libraries had several shelves of “for dummies” books about Windows editions that are no longer used, etc.

And a cafe is a great way to draw in patrons and keep them for longer, thus increasing the likelihood of them borrowing books. It’s not automatically a bad thing that things other than books exist in libraries.