Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Lord of the Flies

So I finished it. What a scary story. I read this in high school, but not since then. I didn't see the movie, but I bet it was really creepy. I can imagine this on film. The heat, the sweat. The cute little British boys turning into savages...And it was so easy, that slide into lawlessness. It's very disturbing.
But really, what did I think would happen when I reread this story? Would I suddenly understand why people would want to ban it? The fact that someone wanted to ban it, doesn't make it more than it is.
I'm not any smarter than I was before. Shoot.

Monday, October 20, 2008

The Shame...

of starting a blog and then not adding to it!  Oh, the laziness!  Oh well.  There has been a public request for the list of books I am reading.  So here it is:

1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, James Joyce
7. Beloved, Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
9. 1984, George Orwell
10. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
11. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
12. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
13. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
14. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
15. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
16. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
17. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
18. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
20. Sond of Solomon, Toni Morrison
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Native Son, Richard Wright
23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
24. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
25. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
26. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
27. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
28. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
29. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
30. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
31. Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawerence
32. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
33. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
34. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
35. Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
36. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
37. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
38. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
39. Women in Love, DH Lawrence
40. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
41. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
42. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
43. Rabbit Run, John Updike

Many of these I have read before. But I'll read them again to see if I can understand why people would want to ban them.  

Monday, September 8, 2008

My Own Private Windmill
      I have never lived in a community where books were banned.   Or maybe I have and never payed attention.  I don't understand banning or burning books.  I really don't get it.  Soon it will be Banned Books Week and I thought it would be cool to read some of those banned books.  Let's see what the big todo is all about.  I googled banned books and came up with some serious listage.  Wikipedia has a huge list of books banned around the world since the dawn of man. That's too many for me.  So I picked this list: "Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century".  Sweet.  And, I thought I'd blog about this experience.  We'll see how it goes.  Stay tuned...