ZeFrank on Dumbledore Sexuality
I love ZeFrank’s blog, and what he had to say about an author and their characters after the fact is spot on.
Archive for October, 2007
NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo stuff
Blog roll of NaBloPoMo participants (to add yours, join the Ning group here, then click the Participants tab and follow instructions):
NaNoWriMo Linkage:
Join us in our crazy dreams this November!
LitLiberation
Blog for a good cause, Literacy. Read more about from Phil Butler, colleague at Profy, then go support his fund drive.
Back To School Book List
Every school district works with its teachers to compose lesson plans and reading lists designed to expose kids to the same basic works of fiction. The schools want to build a base of common knowledge, things “everyone should know” to function in and relate to society.
School book lists are great, but often leave out works of fiction that have merit. Sometimes the work of fiction is considered politically incorrect. Occasionally, a work is passed over for the list because of concerns that not every kid in the class will be able to comprehend it. Books are even overlooked sometimes because a teacher’s life is busy, and she may not have had a chance to read it yet.
Whatever the reason, following are books that are often overlooked in the regular school curriculum that we feel should be read by kids everywhere. If you are lucky enough to have them on your syllabus, excellent! If we overlooked your favorites, please Email Us and let us know what they are so we can do a feature on them for you. This list of recommendations was created with the teen age-group in mind, or any kid reading at or above the teen
level. It is in no particular order. Enjoy!
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
My Brother Sam is Dead, James Collier
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter Miller
Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson
Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsberg
The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander
Catherine, Called Birdy, Karen Cushman
The Great Gilly Hopkins and Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
Letters from Rifka and Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse
The Egypt Game and The Gypsy Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and Crispin: Cross of Lead, Avi
The Moorchild, Eloise McGraw
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, Nancy Farmer
The Cricket in Times Square, George Selden
Nightbirds on Nantucket, Joan Aiken
Freckles, Gene Porter
The Girl Who Owned A City, O. T. Nelson
Pink and Say, Patricia Polacco
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Bless the Beasts and the Children, Glendon Swarthout
Some books suggested were excluded (The Scarlet Letter, for example) not because we think they aren’t worthy of recommendation, but because they already have a firmly entrenched place on the standard recommendation
lists.
One of the many teachers who helped make this list has written a lovely review of books recommended by fifth grade students for fifth grade students. You can read her review here. Another of the people who helped make this list writes reviews of adult books that can be found here.
Many thanks to the folks at EA, teachers and readers alike, for helping compile this list!
New Digs!
This blog has now joined my other “working” blogs, looking more uniform. What do you think of the new digs? Let me know if anything isn’t working for you. Over the course of the next few days I’ll be adding sites back in to the side bar, etc, so don’t panic if your link is missing. If you want to be added to the sidebar as a new link, let me know in an email or in the comments.
Keep Your Eyes Peeled
New site design coming this weekend to BooksWithoutLimits.com!
Meme: Which Of These Books Have You Read?
From Zoot today:
Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk * to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
*Catch-22
*One Hundred Years of Solitude
*Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
*The Name of the Rose
*Don Quixote
Moby Dick
*Ulysses
Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
*The Time Traveller’s Wife
*The Iliad
Emma
*The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
*Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
*Love in the Time of Cholera
*Brave New World
*The Fountainhead
*Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
*The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
*A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
*The Grapes of Wrath
*The Poisonwood Bible
*1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
*Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
*Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
*The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
*A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
*Beloved
*Slaughterhouse-Five
*The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
*Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
*The Catcher in the Rye
*On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
*Freakonomics
*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
*The Three Musketeers
Yes, I am an English Literature and Clinical Psychology person, how could you tell? *wink I’ve read all of the books on the list (and, in fact, they are all on my bookshelf but a few I lent out never to see again).
If you do the meme, put a link to your blog in comments!
First Amendment and Banned Books
How the first amendment helps fight banned books and ensure our freedom to read freely.
Not many bookworms have time to think about what guarantees our freedom to read what we want, when want to read it, wherever we want to do so. There are so many countries around the world where you can’t just read any book that you take a liking to. It boggles the mind to think about.
If you are lucky enough to get your hands on a contraband book in some countries, you certainly don’t have the freedom to sit under a tree on a beautiful day and read it under a clear blue sky. You’d have to read it in secret and keep the book and your newfound knowledge hidden.
So how did America get so lucky? When we ratified the Constitution, we included the First Amendment. You can read the full text of the First Amendment here.
Over the years we have had to fight battle after battle to keep the freedoms inherent in this Amendment. So who and what do we have to thank for keeping our freedom to read intact over the years? Quite a few lawyers and judges, as it turns out.
You can read a synopsis of the struggle over the First Amendment on this page. It includes brief descriptions of the groundbreaking cases and other facts surrounding the First Amendment and its effect on Banned Books.
Tomorrow Is De-Lurking Day!
Radcliffe 100 Has 42 Banned Books
Out of the Top 100 books of the 20th Century as listed by the Radcliff Publishing Course, 42 are or have been on the banned or challenged book list.
The 42 Banned or Challenged Books from the Radcliff Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century:
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
(challenged due to language and sexual
references)
• Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
(banned and challenged numerous times over the years for being anti white, obscene, language, vulgarity,
content, sexually explicit, violent, blasphemy, moral issues, and more)
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
(banned or challenged for language, vulgarity, taking the lord’s name in vain, sexual references)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
(banned or challenged for use of the word nigger, for promoting racial segregation, for racial themes, for language)
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
(banned or challenged for sexual and social explicitness, rough language, violence, racial and reglious issues)
• Ulysses, James Joyce
(Burned in US and other countries)
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
(Banned and challenged for violence and sexual material)
• The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
(Banned or challenged due to violence, sexual content, racism and demoralizing humans)
• 1984, George Orwell
(banned or challenged for being procommunist and sexually explicit)
• Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
(banned or challenged for obscenity)
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
(banned or challenged for profanity, lack of patriotism on the part of the author, blasphemy, indecency)
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
(banned or challenged for sexual reference)
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
(banned or challenged for a variety of variation son the theme of lacking in moral content and promoting
promiscuity)
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
(burned in Nazi bonfires, banned in several US cities)
• As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
(banned or challenged for obscenity, abortion references and sexual content)
• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
(banned in several US cities)
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
(banned in several US cities)
• Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
(banned or challenged for sexual explicitness and language)
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
(banned or challenged for violence and vulgarity)
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
(banned or challenged for racial issues and obscenity)
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
(banned or challenged for issues of race)
• Native Son, Richard Wright
(banned or challenged for language, violance, sex, profanity)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
(banned or challenged for encouraging criminal behavior, corrupting youth and containing passages of bestiality,
violence, torture, dismemberment, death, and depraved acts)
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
(this book has been banned or challenged in numorous places, but is noteworthy for being burned in North Dakota
as late as 1973)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
(banned overseas)
• The Call of the Wild, Jack London
(banned overseas, burned in Nazi bonfires in 1933)
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
(banned or challenged for depicting rape, violence and hatred of women)
• All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
(challenged in several US cities)
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
(banned overseas, burned in Nazi bonfires 1933)
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
(banned or challenged for sexual themes and moral issues)
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
(banned or challenged for language and profanity)
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
(banned or challenged for sex, violence and profanity)
• Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
(banned overseas, author et al sentenced to death by the Ayatolla Khommeni if he ever sets foot in his home
country again, book banned in many US cities)
• Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
(challenged, never banned)
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
(challenged in several US cities)
• A Separate Peace, John Knowles
(banned or challenged for language and sexual content)
• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
(banned for obscenity)
• Women in Love, DH Lawrence
(banned or challenged for obscenity)
• The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
(banned in Canada and Australia)
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
(banned as obscene)
• An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
(banned in Boston and burned in Nazi bonfires 1933)
• Rabbit, Run, John Updike
(banned or challenged for obscenity, indecency and sexuality)
(you can view the complete list of 100 greatest novels here)
Hire Me On 
