Category — memes

This is another “I have no post prepared for today” posts. This is a list of banned books that I stole from Literary Feline. I have only a little idea of why some of these books were banned, or challenged and by no means do I believe this list is complete, but here it is.

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve actually read the whole way through (only 48? I’m disappointed in myself) - and I’m working on the rest.

Edited because ordered lists apparently stop at number nine in WordPress. There are 110 books listed here – sorry about the stupid bullet points.

• The Bible
• Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
• The Koran
• Arabian Nights
• Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
• Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
• Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
• Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
• Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
• Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
• Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
• Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• Autobiography – Benjamin Franklin
• Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
• Essays – Michel de Montaigne
• Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
• Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
• Ulysses – James Joyce
• Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• Candide – Voltaire
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• Analects – Confucius
• Dubliners – James Joyce
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
• Red and the Black – Stendhal
• Capital – Karl Marx
• Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
• Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
• Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
• Jungle – Upton Sinclair
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
• Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Diary – Samuel Pepys
• Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
• Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• Praise of Folly – Desiderius Erasmus
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
• Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
• Essay Concerning Human Understanding – John Locke
• The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
• Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• East of Eden – John Steinbeck
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
• Confessions – Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Gargantua and Pantagruel – François Rabelais
• Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
• The Talmud
• Social Contract – Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Bridge to Terabithia – Katherine Paterson
• Women in Love – D. H. Lawrence
• American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
• Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
• A Separate Peace – John Knowles
• Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• Red Pony – John Steinbeck
• Popol Vuh
• Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith
• Satyricon – Petronius
• James and the Giant Peach – Roald Dahl
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Black Boy – Richard Wright
• Spirit of the Laws – Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
• Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
• Julie of the Wolves – Jean Craighead George
• Metaphysics – Aristotle
• Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Institutes of the Christian Religion – Jean Calvin
• Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse
• Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
• Sanctuary – William Faulkner
• As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
• Black Like Me – John Howard Griffin
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble – William Steig
• Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• General Introduction to Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud
• Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Alexander Brown
• Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ernest J. Gaines
• Émile – Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Nana – Émile Zola
• Chocolate War – Robert Cormier
• Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
• Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A. Heinlein
• Day No Pigs Would Die – Robert Peck
• Ox-Bow Incident – Walter Van Tilburg Clark
• Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes

My excuses for not posting in nearly a week are as follows:

“I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.”

OK, those are Jake Blues excuses for not showing up at his wedding – my excuses are a bit more mundane.

1. Work. Lots and lots of work – which is good when you’ve just started your own business!
2. Enjoying the perfect peace that is created when the three year old who lives above you and his mum are in another country.
3. Enchanted Arms on the XBox 360.

However, work is slow today (waiting on client feedback), the kid upstairs is back – complete with running wild and earsplitting, rage-fuelled, screaming tantrums – and the TV and XBox are turned off.

And what do I have to say for myself? Not much. So please enjoy this meme that Trixfiend tagged me for!

The rules:

• Write your own six word memoir.
• Post it to your blog – with a representative photo if you like.
• Link to the person who tagged you in your post (and to this original post so we can see where the meme travels).
• Tag five more blogs in your post.
• Leave comments on those same five blogs with an invitation to play.

My contribution:

Simple things make me happy.

And now for the tagging!

• Curlywurlygurly – You can use your favourite writing implement – or procrastinate – you choose!
• Renee – I hope your computer cooperates!
• Still Baking – because I know you think memes are fun.
• Nate – I think yours will be very interesting and have a kick-ass photo.
• BretCB – I just want to know what your memoir is because I’m nosy like that.

If you don’t want to participate – that’s OK too.

This is my “I don’t have a better post prepared today.” post. Still, I did have to bold a lot of stuff, so I think I get a few points for a little effort (a very little effort).

I found this meme over at Trixfiend’s blog (hi Allison! I’m stalking your old entries!) You’re supposed to bold all the books you’ve read – and I’m going to add a few little comments too.

I’ve read 75 of the 100 books on this list. I suppose I qualify as reasonably literate.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (Mr. Darcy is my literary boyfriend.)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) (I still cry over Matthew when I re-read this book)
9. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Rebecca Wells)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) (Owen Meany is a fascinating character)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) (I still get teary over Beth in this book)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) (I couldn’t finish it. Not a big fan.)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) (love, love, love this book)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) 
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) (My ex’s mum lent me a copy of this – I’m so glad she did. It was awesome!)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) 
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella) (I wanted to smack the main character.)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. [Bible] (I read the whole thing in university)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) (I didn’t think I’d like this book – but I ended up loving it)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough) (bloody fantastic book!)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) (In my top 5 of all time favourites.)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy) (I’ve only read half, but I’m counting it anyway.
64. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies) (Didn’t like this one. I know, I’m a cretin.)
65. Interview With the Vampire (Anne Rice)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) (I did NOT enjoy this book. The main characters are ridiculous)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence) (I love this book, even though it sort of depresses me)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) (Has the best opening line of a book ever.)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields) (I hated this book. What is all the fuss about?)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)