Saturday, September 21, 2019

How Many of These Banned Books Have You Read?



Recently I walked into The Tatnuck Bookseller in Westboro, MA and was fascinated by this display titled “Banned Books Week, Sept. 22-28, 2019.  So I photographed it!



 I’ve read most of these, and Amalia has read the “Junie B. Jones” series and all of Harry Potter.






 I was reminded of how, when I was 18 in 1959 and coming home from a student trip to Europe, we all bought banned books in Paris--the ones with blank yellow paper covers and the pages you had to cut apart—and then read them on the boat and threw them into the sea before we got to Customs in NYC. 


There was  "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and  lots of Henry Miller  and the Marquis de Sade.  Wish I had kept those yellow paperbacks with the rough paper edges.

But how could anyone ban my childhood favorites, Jack London's "The Call of The 
Wild"? And "To Kill a Mockingbird?"  And "Tom Sawyer"?  And "Grapes of Wrath"?

When I was small my mother told me I couldn't read "Gone With the Wind" until I was 21.  So naturally I read it the next week.  And loved it (as well as the movie.)

What banned books have you read and loved?