banned book week

no books should be banned. If you dont want to read a book then dont. If you read a book that, in your opinion is BAD, then that it no ones fault. That is your opinion and by banning books that means that you want to make that everyone elses opinion. People should be free to read and write whatever they please.

Books that I wish had never been written: Paradise Lost. Caesar's Civil War. Le Mystere Frontenac. Everything by Marsilius of Padua. The Narnia Books. Mercier and Camier. Mein Kampf.

oh... narnia chronicles are magical for a child... i loved them and my children have too. Don't ban them :o( Lets ban Tristram Shandy please.

me ditto mi

Tristram Shandy? Is that, like, Bateman's bitter with lemonade?

Hen - sort it out. Just because a book has ripped off another book doesn't make its point redundant. If a point, made once, was never made again then we'd be running out of books pretty soon? If you get my point. Pointless really, all this pointificating. Anyhoo, 1984 is powerful if flawed. It may be stolen and badly-executed but to my sixteen year old eyes it had a profound effect. And Liana, get over your Toby Litt allergy. If you haven't read Deadkidsongs then don't slate him. If you have then... fair point. Joe

I have indeed... I shan't be getting over it anytime soon mate. Sorry an' all that. I take it back about Tristram Shandy though. On deeper examination, I loved it. Am loving it. Batty and clever as all hell.

I couldn't get more than a few pages through it. "Humphrey Clinker" was even less readable. In fact I don't think I've made it through a single eighteenth-century novel, though I did get three-quarters oif the way through "Robinson Crusoe". But I do love watching the plays, particularly Farquar, Goldsmith, Goldoni, and "The Beggar's Opera".

Eh? Is that a book?

I second Wuthering Heights... and also request that all pratchetts, sillohette romances (especially dr/nurse ones) be added to the list. White Teeth... Toby Litt (anything)

White Teeth for definite. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, because I got it for Christmas one year and hated it with a huge passion. Even Treasure Island was a gruelling rather than joyful read - and for a boy who spend his entire childhood wishing he was on a desert island and drawing treasure maps and a comic called Pirate Weekly, that shows the level of disappointment I had in it. (I also dug my own desert island in the woods, but the water kept draining into the soil, v v disappointing) I did have a child's version of Moby Dick that christmas, in a purple cover, with illustrations - really gory ones, of Ahab going down under the water hanging onto a harpoon stuck into the whale. I'd love to find that book again. Likewise the illustrated children's Shakespeare with MacBeth, Twelth Night, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, which had the most blood bespattered pages I e'er did see.

I got a book from the book club entitled "100 Banned Books" and it includes just about anything that's ever been worth reading, including the Bible and the Qu'ran. Sex, drugs and bad language tend to top the modern excuse list, but there's also things like "containing negative racial stereotypes" and "promoting disobedience to parents". Being an English teacher in a conservative town in the States must be a shitty job - you never know when you're going to get hauled over the coals for promoting something that normal people would call a literary classic.

I was horrified that A Handmaid's Tale was banned. For me, that's like banning 1984 - there are some books that are important because they show how valuable our freedom and things we take for granted are. They're pro-democracy, pro-liberty, pro-fraternity. I thought those things were fairly central to the American Way.

Ha! Americans are always trying to ban Kurt Vonnegut, and anyone else who thinks sensibly. But then, we're always talking about banning computer games because of their content, which is just as nutty. What do I wish hadn't been written? Umm... very little that I've actually read. All the Harry Potters, partly because they're bilge, and partly because they've inspired so much follow-up bilge. But damn... would that mean no Lemony Snickett? Everything by Sylvia Plath, because I'm fed up of hearing about her. '1984' because it's a pointless rip-off of a far superior book that Orwell himself admitted was a complete balls-up, and which opinion columnists have been using for the last half a century as a cosh to batter their political enemies with. "There's something distinctly Orwellian about this!" "Oh, piss off." And something contemporary: "Michael Moore is a Stupid White Man", written by the same sadcases who've set up websites which correct Moore's factual errors. If ever there was a point missed...

You think 1984 is pointless? Over bleak, depressing I'd go for, but pointless? There might well be better books that he's nicked the general idea from, I'd give you that, but pointless? You really think there's no point to the 'do it to Julia' sequence? A moment in literature where the writer says, it doesn't matter how much you love someone, if you were put under enough pressure (and there's enough pressure for everyone, it just takes skill to exert it) you'd betray them? That shook the hell out of me when I read it, but it's right. It is an unpalatable and terrifying truth, but its a truth. And not one I can recall seeing anywhere else. You can say you don't like it, that's a fair point, but it's not bloody pointless.

It's pointless if it's all been done in the book he nicked it from! Well, alright - you could always argue that it has a 'point' - maybe these things need to be said again. But the importance of 1984 is grossly exaggerated, and I'm almost completely fed up of hearing about it.

I haven't heard of most of the books on that list, but requests like that rarely succeed. Catcher in the Rye, for example, has been on 'banned' lists since it was published in the 1950s, but it is readily available everywhere. I recall in the 60s, some books really were banned. Tropic of Cancer and other Miller classics were illegal to own in most places because they were deemed to be obscene in a legal sense. Subsequently, the notion of 'community standards' came into being as the criterion for determining obsenity. I recall my mother receiving copies of those books in the mail from her relatives in North Carolina and Virginia. In theory that could have resulted in a jail term in a Federal prison. I always found it typical Christian hypocracy that the very people who banged on about 'law and order' and 'decency' were the prime violators. Oddly, I never read them myself, even though they were readily available to me.