one

how could i have missed Banned Books Week?

well it happened mostly while i was out … out and away …

so i’ll make up for it by listing … as memory allows it … books that have been banned in my sphere of influence … i mean, books that i would have read or taught but was kept from it by someone else or by what i thought someone else might say :

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley
In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Flight to Canada by Ismael Reed
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
Fade by Robert Cormier

most of these were teaching objections … some were reading objections … i’ve read all of them now … except the Baldwin … fell through the cracks …

is this all from the distant past? no … one is quite recent … and still stings a bit

update: on the other hand … i’m grateful for the support of colleagues, department, administrators, parents, and students in the teaching of:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner