110 banned books. The rules say to bold the books you’ve read completely, and italicize those read in part. I was infected with this meme at Jayne Doodle’s - who shares my taste in the science fiction/fantasy genres at least. Many of these books were read in my literature classes in high school and undergrad - I wonder if such requirements still exist. For example, I never would have been exposed to Chaucer if not for my undergrad medieval lit class. I was genuinely surprised at the number of “banned” books on this list that I have read - and even more surprised at the number that I read and enjoyed. It’s interesting to ponder what about each of these books got them banned in the first place, eh? My favorite book on the list, without question, is Flowers for Algernon. The book that I’ve read that had the greatest effect on me that’s not on this list? Cancer Ward, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
1 The Bible
2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4 The Koran
5 Arabian Nights
6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25 Ulysses by James Joyce
26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29 Candide by Voltaire
30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31 Analects by Confucius
32 Dubliners by James Joyce
33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
36 Capital by Karl Marx
37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
58 Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69 The Talmud
70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71 Bridge to Terabinthia by Katherine Paterson
72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78 Popol Vuh
79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80 Satyricon by Petronius
81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
103 Nana by Émile Zola
104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg
110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
