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?
2 comments:
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, was banned by the Concord MA public library, which of course made it a national best-seller. Twain became a wealthy man. The ban was imposed because of the 'low, coarse common language,' not because of the n- word that has caused it to be banned in some areas today.
Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Grapes of Wrath.
Why these books - or any books - were/are banned is beyond me.
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