Banned Books Week on The Point

Today’s book show on The Point was a discussion on banned and censored books, as we celebrated Banned Books Week. Mindy was away today, so Sean Corcoran joined us as host, along with Peter Abrahams, and Jill Erickson. Below is the list of the titles we discussed, and if you missed the show you can always listen online at WCAI! And here is a link to the Maya Angelou poem Those Who Ban Books

Peter’s Picks

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Jill’s Picks

Banned Books: Challenging Our Freedom to Read by Robert P. Doyle

Obscene in the Extreme: the burning and banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman

120 Banned Books: censorship histories of world literature

Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: from Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq by Fernando Báez

Fahrenheit 451, 60th Anniversary Edition by Ray Bradbury with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman

Note from one of our listeners, which we didn’t have time to read on air:

“Thank you for taking up this topic that touches us all more often than one might suppose! As a former librarian and a bookseller, I have found some parents anxious about the content of some books. And grandparents are ten times as anxious! And sometimes I felt a parent would feel deeply uncomfortable with the values put across in the book or series. For these matters, I developed two prescriptions: first, books are like hotpads. They let readers pick up hot topics without getting burned. Second, read the book as a chance to discuss the values with your child. Ask them what they think of the choices a character makes, or if they’ve ever been in a similar situation, or seen it happen. Finally, after years of making hourly choices about what books to stock and which titles to recommend to whom, I realized that tastes and needs are so varied that parents and grandparents need worry little. When it comes to books, kids only pick up what they can carry. Carol”