My Library » censorship http://library.tom-hanna.org Books , magazines, newspapers, the printed word Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:53:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 Banned Books http://library.tom-hanna.org/2009/banned-books/ http://library.tom-hanna.org/2009/banned-books/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:52:28 +0000 tomhanna http://library.tom-hanna.org/?p=94 a

Banned Books

]]> Over the next several months I'll be writing some posts on the topic of threatened books under the topic «banned books». I won't actually be limiting myself to books that have suffered an actual legal ban but will be including banned, boycotted, threatened and censored books, books whose authors have suffered «fatwas» or similar extrajudicial punishment, and controversial books that have narrowly escaped these fates. I'm devoting this project to the concept from Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature that «readers are born free and ought to remain free.»

I'm currently reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a book which while not directly banned has certainly stirred some controversy. Nafisi takes as one of her themes that same quote from Nabokov, an author she returns to time and again not merely in the novel about the eponymous Dolores Hayes, but in other novels, poems and essays. In addition to sources such as the American Library Association's «100 Most Frequently Challenged Books» I'll also be reading some of the selections from Nafisi's book.

The first few books include:

  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
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Banned Books

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