List Love – The Library at Woodring Estate

On Monday I talked to you about my (lack of) experience with censorship. Yesterday I shared with you my harebrained ideas for celebrating Banned Books Week without actually reading. Today I am back to talking about books. For real. Between work and my personal love of all things literary Banned Book Week always ends up as the fever pitch week near the end of September where I am screaming about my favorite classics.

This year I will do that screaming here. It will be dignified screaming. You won’t even be able to tell I’m raising my voice.

One of the things I really do love about Banned Book Week is thinking back on these books, ones that I have loved, and seeing them through new eyes. The things that I found endearing or daring were threatening to others. It makes an interesting thought exercise, and also very happy to not live in Big Brother’s London where these thoughts would surely be banned.

So here are a few of my favorite books that others find distasteful, vulgar, and dangerous. I am proud to have read them. I consider myself a more informed, thoughtful reader for their inclusion in my reading life.

Brave New World
One summer in college I decided I was going to rectify a large gap in my dystopian reading and check out BNW and 1984 back to back. I wound up enamoured with Huxley. He described a world that didn’t seem so different from Western culture now. No boredom. No attention spans. Drugs. Emptiness masquerading as happiness. It was such a powerful statement from 80 years prior.

1984

In a similar vein I was horrified by Orwell’s future. It is terrifying. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Sound like anything you know? I think the most terrifying part for me in both 1984 and Brave New World is there isn’t an escape. Big Brother Wins. Soma still exists. Society doesn’t change. These aren’t the dystopian resistance novels of the 2010’s. Society wins, not the rebels. They’re a cautionary tale, not a promise for a better future.

Slaughterhouse Five

I am writing this list while playing with my favorite necklace, a cursive “So it goes” charm at its center. Vonnegut can be vulgar. He can be strange. He can be utterly engrossing. I love every moment I spent with Slaughterhouse Five. I love how it made me think about time and existence. I love everything about it. I also everything else I have read by him. Cat’s Cradle has also been challenged multiple times. It is also a book I recommend constantly.

To Kill a Mockingbird

On Friday I’ll talk more about Harper Lee, but for now let me just say – the stories we read as children hold a special place in our hearts. When those stories are also about children developing their own moral compass in an unfair world, they stick with us even more.

Harry Potter

Guys, just check out my post about how much I love Harry Potter. It’ll save us both a lot of time.

The Hunger Games

To this day I don’t know what made me pick up The Hunger Games. Battle Royale style books and movies do not really do it for me. Katniss didn’t move me. Collin’s still managed to make me care about Panam, about Rue, and Peeta. I was rooting for them to live. I was rooting for the resistance the entire series. It was the type of series I needed at the time.

And here, in no particular order are some other lovely books I absolutely loved that have been challenged:
Looking for Alaska
The Egypt Game
Just One Day
Catch 22
The Outsiders
The Kite Runner
Flowers for Algernon
The Things They Carried
Eleanor & Park
The Catcher in the Rye

What are some of your favorite banned or challenged books? Do you understand the reason they were challenged?

If you can remember back to Monday, you’ll recall that my summer has a bit of a theme. Like any reasonable person I am embracing my current reading obsession with open arms. Here are a list of books I hope to get to in the not too distant future.

Lavinia – I’m a sucker for female centered retellings of classic stories. After powering through the Aeneid I am curious to see what powerhouse Le Guin can do with Lavinia. She’s only mentioned a handful of times in the original text, but her existence sets so many things into motion. I hope to see her have real agency. Her perspective on war and marriage should be fascinating.

Galatea – Admittedly I knew little of Galatea, the marble statue come to life before this summer. However I would currently trust Madeline Miller with my reading life. Short stories are also some of my favorite things to read so I am extra excited to see how much information could be packed into this small package.

Mythos & Heroes – Both by Stephen Fry, these are retellings of all the myths we’ve grown to know, love, yawn at, reference poorly, and everything in between. After reading Norse Mythology last year I was desperate to find a modern take on Greek tales, and it seems like I have finally gotten exactly what I asked for. My two copies are sitting by my nightstand now, waiting to be read.

The Cassandra – World War II. A Seer that no one will believe. Sign me up. I have noticed a surprising (at least to me) lack of Cassandra retellings in my searching. Her myth is so iconic, and her plight so easy to translate across settings and eras that I was expecting to find them everywhere. I’m hoping this lives up to expectations

Gods Behaving Badly – It’s modern day and our favorite Gods are feeling a little irrelevant. They’re sharing a flat in London and wreaking havoc on their neighbors, and possibly the world! This sounds like an adult Percy Jackson to me and I am so here for it!

The Penelopiad – The Odyssey but from Penelope perspective. Also they’re in Hades. And there may be some repercussions for slaughtering all her maids. Sign me up.

A Thousand Ships – Lastly we have what sounds like The Silences of the Girls on steroids. This is toted as being the Trojan War told entirely from the perspective of the different woman that lived and suffered through. I cannot wait to get my hands on this. I will probably need a lot of chocolate and other comfort foods to compensate for all of the misery. It’ll be worth it.

So that is my Mythology related TBR. I hope there are a few you haven’t heard of and may join me in reading!