Today’s micromeme is due to the reliable and well-informed wh00ps, who has by what seem to be convoluted and tortuous means obtained a list of the books banned by some totalitarian toe-rag claiming to be something to do with ‘education’.
How many of these books have you read, and how many will you read?
>The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Never heard of it.
>His Dark Materials trilogy
Yup. Desperate potboilers, I thought.
>Sabriel
No.
>The Canterbury Tales
Naturally.
>Candide
Never had the time.
>The Divine Comedy
Likewise. Once went out with a girl who knew it by heart, though.
>Paradise Lost
Yes, worse luck. What an interminable bore that man was.
>The Godfather
Seen the film, I think, and thought it was silly.
>Mort
Read the book. Read the play. Involved in producing the play now.
>Interview with the Vampire
Don’t know it.
>The Hunger Games
Likewise.
>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Yeah, I read it. Once.
>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Nope.
>Animal Farm
Very much so.
>The Witches
By whom? Too many books with the same title.
>Shade’s Children
Never heard of.
>The Evolution of Man
By? Not that fellow who was on the telly, surely?
> the Holy Qu’ran
Have read. Have two copies, one with the distinction of being the only translation made by a Jewish scholar.
The list continues:
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
No.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
Once, ages ago.
• Slaughterhouse-5
Oh yes. Not very nice.
• Lord of the Flies
Not nice at all. Not at all.
• Bridge to Terabithia
Don’t remember that one.
• Catch-22
But that one I do.
• East of Eden
No.
• The Brothers Grimm Unabridged Fairytales.
Blimey. Probably. I was doubtless about five at the time.
The perpetrator of this horrible crime against state censorship is quoted as saying:
Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I’m doing a good thing, right?
Right, I’d say. Damn right!
The question of why these books should be banned by a school, anywhere in the world, is quite a different one.
I can understand why they’ve put some of them on the hit list, but ‘Bridge to Terabithia’? And ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide..’?
What’s that all about?
The Sufi idea behind it all is from time-to-time an ass tries this banning-something-or-other stuff — with the predictable result that everybody and their brother dives right in. It’s actually a great technique for promoting certain inputs. There are doubtless limits on this technique, though. I suppose that thereby inculcating a popular interest in Algebra and taste for Latin would be the Big Proof and ‘final validation’ of this all?
(Nice to see, though, that RAH [pbuh] and Mr Vance are not even on the radar of this ‘education’ crew…Wook)
Quite a few of these were not just unbanned when I was at school, they were set-books.
This sketch is getting silly.
My to-do list just got a little longer.
Not /The Godfather/, surely, LUC?
[...] with this question is ‘today’s internet meme’…and I’ve been tagged (The Landed Underclass [...]
Hey, maybe you’re right, Emmett. Maybe it was just *a* Godfather.
[...] case are difficult to glean – I’ve been through Boing Boing, Xanthippa’s, wh00ps and Landed Underclass, unravelling the thread to the original Yahoo Answers post, with little extra [...]
Lord of the flies can’t be banned. Also I have had to teach it. It is a story of how bad drives out good, and then they all die, horribly, it’s typical socialist pessimism about the Modern World (which they did not create but want to destroy.)
Hitchhiker’s is liked by my boy, our YouTube researcher. He has read the entire pentateuch three times, so I guess it has to be banned, since it is by contrast an optimistic and humorous book.
They don’t all die; the Navy turn up in the end and collect the survivors (“I would have thought that British lads would put up a better show than that.”). I would have classed this as ‘optimistic’; my own school contemporaries would have been less likely to leave so many alive.
I can’t abide Adams myself. I do not take SF so seriously that I object to its being satirised (e.g. Harrison’s excellent ‘Bill, the Galactic Hero’, one of my favourites); what I object to is the satire being so tiresomely childish, perhaps thanks to its having been written for the BBC.