Two Mega-Memes

[cygna_hime]

Both from various people.


List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain [For school this year, I might add!]
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain [School again, 7th grade.]
#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 The 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 [School, 8th grade.]
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [School this year. V. Good.]
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck [School last year--I don't get this.]
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [Ah, drug use.]
#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 [History this year.]
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding [School, later this year. Fun.]
#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 [School, last year. Irony, much?]
#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 J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye 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 Terabithia by Katherine Paterson [School, possibly 5th grade.]
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [History this year. Too wordy.]
#75 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 [What for?]
#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 [Huh?]
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder [WTF?]
#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 Jean by 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 Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes [School...8th grade? 7th? I forget.]

Note: Okay, some of these win a resounding "WTF?" from me. What's wrong with the Little House books, for crying out loud? Or Julie of the Wolves? Or James and the Giant Peach? That's my childhood you're trying to ban, there!

Others...well, the people who ban these books need a remedial course in irony. In the top 100 are a book on burning books (451), a book on destroying the past (1984), a book on totalitarianism (Animal Farm), and the defining texts of half the world's religions, as well as every major philosophy and several minor ones. Hint: Banning the books which talk about how banning books is bad is not perhaps the wisest move you could make.

*lesigh* People depress me.



Card Captor Sakura:
1. The pairing you first fell in love with: Touya/Yukito, possibly my first true pairing love. The fluff! The angst! The plot! The characters! The canon! These guys are in my heart for good.

2. The pairing you never expected to love as much as you do now: Meiling/Naoko, henceforth referred to as 'OMG what the f--- are you ON?'-shipping. It was a passing fancy that turned into a deep and abiding affection. But they're so cute!

3. The pairing everyone else loves that you don't: Eriol/Tomoyo, of a certainty. The better part of the fandom is all over them, and I just don't see it. They both like other people, and while they would be a terrifyingly efficient team, that doesn't mean they have to be in love. Friend-ship: (n.) Affection between two or more people not involving romantic attraction. It can happen. Really!

4. The pairing you love that everyone else hates: Eriol/Kaho, by extension from the above. Canon lives! Kaho-bashing and Kaho-ignoring are two of the things I despise about the majority of the fandom. You can't just vanish a character like that. And I like this pairing. It's sweet, and fluffy, and Wimseycal (especially when artyartie is writing them), and I love them.

5. The pairing you used to love but don't any longer: Syaoran/Sakura. They're the pairing fandom killed. I just haven't seen enough stuff that doesn't suck for the emotional investment to be worth while. *sigh* Such is life.

Yuugiou:
1. The pairing you first fell in love with: Yuugi/Jou. I attribute this to seeing canon before fanon, and having already developed anti-dub sensors. There may be a sweeter, more canonical couple, but my love-meter didn't pick it up. I loved those two from the moment I saw the canon, and I'll probably still love them when I leave the fandom in disgust.

2. The pairing you never expected to love as much as you do now: Pegasus/Noa. Another WTF? pairing that mutated into semi-canon. I need to stop thinking of story ideas before bed, clearly. Anyway, it started out random and goofy, and ended up with a life of its own...and banter. Lots of banter. And it's plotful and geeky and silly and I love it so.

3. The pairing everyone else loves that you don't: Seto/Jou. I will say this only once: They hate each other! This is the Harry/Draco of the YGO fandom, the one that has less than no canon but everyone insists is subtrextual anyway. Though it's not.

4. The pairing you love that everyone else hates: Yuugi/Anzu. I am, and remain, one of the three people to think they are cute. And that Anzu's character is perfectly fine the way it is. The rest of the fandom seems either too afraid of catching the Het Germs or incapable of writing anything but Harlequin romance novels. Yech. Yes, I like two conflicting pairings. I cope.

5. The pairing you used to love but don't any longer: ...I used to think Yami Bakura/Ryou was cute, in a weird way. Then I discovered how the fandom handled it, wrote a few chapters of a fic that sucked (but not as badly as theirs, since it was at least a more original variety of suck), and left in disgust. Because the characters should not be put in the blender like that.

Lord of the Rings:
1. The pairing you first fell in love with: Faramir/Eoqyn, hands down. I've loved them since I first read the book. They were the canonical couple we saw develop the most, so I really felt I understood how they got together. Also, I loved both the characters to itsy bits by the end of Two Towers.

2. The pairing you never expected to love as much as you do now: Aragorn/Arwen. Admittedly, the never expected-ness lasted up until the Appendix, but that was a lack of expectation. I'd caught on by the end of Fellowship, but I never expected it to be so beautiful and shiny and sad and...wah. Also, the people trying to break them up annoy me, making me more protective.

3. The pairing everyone else loves that you don't: Legolas/Aragorn. It presses all my "WTF? You didn't read the books, did you?" buttons, including the "Aragorn. Marries. Arwen. Fools!" and the "Elvish biology, dammit!" buttons. It demeans the Aragorn/Arwen pairing, thereby pushing my "It's Canon, Idiot" button. In short: it's all about pretty. And I don't go for things that are all about pretty.

4. The pairing you love that everyone else hates: Legolas/Gimli, my true love of Tolkien. Because Book!Canon rules all things. The Legolusters may think it's the most disgusting thing ever, but that keeps them away, which suits me just fine. Also, Gimli? My LotR boyfriend. He rules. I love him so.

5. The pairing you used to love but don't any longer: Maedhros/Fingon, oddly. It's not that I don't like them anymore, I'm just...not that interested. Silmslash isn't what I'm after right now. Maybe in a few months the love will return.

Harry Potter:
1. The pairing you first fell in love with: Harry/Ron, I think. My first flirtation with the fandom. I think I've moved on by now. (See below.)

2. The pairing you never expected to love as much as you do now: Snape/Lupin. It is all my mom's fault. All hers. Also the fault of the writers who make it all good and stuff, thereby attracting me like a fruit fly to brandy. It should stop being so damn heartbreaking, and ggo die somewhere. I was forced into 'shipping against my will, I tell you!

3. The pairing everyone else loves that you don't: Harry/Draco. See comments on Seto/Jou above. Hate =/= UST. Thank you.

4. The pairing you love that everyone else hates: Harry/Ron/Hermione, because I can't separate them without a crowbar, and I don't have a crowbar. However, all the H/Hr, R/H, and R/Hr 'shippers will hate me for it. Too bad for them.

5. The pairing you used to love but don't any longer: Sirius/Remus. Ashamed as I am to admit it, the more we learn about how much of a git Sirius is, the less I like him. He's gotten so much on my nerves, I just can't pair him with Remus anymore. Because he is an arrogant git.



Need to finish this meme later, Dad needs me off the computer. Ja!

ETA: Finished! Only used CCS, YGO, HP, and LotR, because I got bored and they have more pairings and fans to play with.

Comments

[laurus-nobilis.livejournal.com]

WORD on Eriol/Tomoyo. I'd love to see them working as a team without being romantically involved once in a while.

A couple of weeks ago, I would've been surprised at Don Quixote being on the banned books list. Now that I'm rereading it, I wonder if it's the not-so-subtle criticism of the church (never mind that it's the 17th century Spanish church, which *deserved* quite a lot of criticism) or the whole load of cross-dressers. ;P

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I love you ! You have the same reading of LotR as I do ! Frankly all the fangirls of the movie SCARES me with their pairing. Book EowynxFaramir and GimlixLegolas forever !

Part 1 of 2.

[dkellis.livejournal.com]

#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
One of those "multi-meaning" stories. You could see it as a criticism of the government/church of that period, or an encouragement to be worldly... or you could just read it for being a good story. (Not to mention the incredible wangst/drama that happened when it was written in its present form, so to speak. Medieval fandom wank!)

#4 The Koran
Like the Christian Bible, it suffers from translation/interpretation issues.

#5 Arabian Nights
Long and frequently gory. It's an interesting read, to say the least.

#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Okay-ish. Good as a story, but I don't remember any hidden philosophies/meanings in it... which is a good thing, actually.

#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Surprisingly entertaining. Just make sure you get a good translation.

#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Sun Zi's Art Of War was better. Yes, they dealt with different things, but at least AoW was more... ethical.

#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
I still don't understand why it was banned. (Apart from the wankery about whether Anne Frank really existed.)

#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
I didn't like most of Dickens. Even more Victorian (in the unpleasant sense) than Dodgson/Carroll, without the entertainment.

#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
To the musical what the X-Men comics were to the movies: really detailed and bloody and dense.

#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
Not bad. I would recommend it if you have nothing better.

#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Long-winded and stuffy. Still, reading it is instructive, if only to dispel a lot of myths on what Darwin supposedly said, rather than what he did say.

#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
Only if you're a masochist or have no choice in the matter. (Damned English major.)

#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Overhyped. Good, but overhyped.

#31 Analects by Confucius
I think it's very good, but then I'm Chinese, and most of it makes obvious sense to me. (Admittedly, a lot of it is also not applicable to modern times.) I'm not sure what a Westerner's view of it would be.

#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [Ah, drug use.]
Buh? Why did this get banned? I mean, yes, A.C.D. wasn't that good of a mystery writer (compared to, say, Agatha Christie), but even the drug use was clearly stated to be Bad. Watson mentioned it many, many times.

#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I'll just put this under the Animal Farm/1984 bunch of "why was it banned", then. It's okay, not much to brag about, although it gets preachy at times.

#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [School, last year. Irony, much?]
The irony, it burns us.

#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Read this for a Philosophy class. Didn't understand Kant's worldview, so most of it didn't make much sense. Maybe it would to others.

#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Great book, but not to be read before bed or when relaxing or whatever. The words are shouted out of the page like a random tirade.

#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
Philosophy again. Slightly more understandable than Kant, but not by much.

#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
It does get kind of grotesque (in the literary sense) at times. Not sure why it would be banned, though, it's not that bad.

#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [History this year. Too wordy.]
Agreed.

Part 2 of 2.

[dkellis.livejournal.com]

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl [What for?]
Indeed.

#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Highly recommended. Every aspiring writer should read this book for a great example of how to characterize.

#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22's randomness meets Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy's sense of whimsy. Good if you haven't read either and aren't planning to, kind of deja vu if you have.

#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
Get a good annotated version. This needs it.

#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder [WTF?]
Banned for being boring, maybe?

#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
I thought Freud read too much into everything. When I took Psychology, I was amazed at how seriously the people who were actually in the field used his techniques.

#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Read it, got bored really quickly. Maybe the reason for banning is in the parts I didn't read.

#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Tries too hard to have a Moral. As mentioned, I don't like to be preached at.

#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
It's an old science fiction book, with all that entails. Stereotypical characters, rehashed plot, stilted writing... possibly it was new and amazing when it first came out. I dunno.

I'm surprised the list didn't have more by Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain, other than the two. His subject matter was frequently at least as controversial as some of the other political works... but then they picked the ones that get flack for alleged racism. Wherefore Connecticut Yankee, for example?

[artyartie.livejournal.com]

When I was looking at this earlier, almost *all* of the books were in bold, and I was very, very impressed. Even still, I'm very impressed - even though reading these lists never fails to piss me off. When I was a bookseller, we'd get the newest lists of banned/challenged books and would scream at some of the newest additions.

Ahh, I do need to indulge in some sweet, fluffy, E/K therapy. It's good for ya. I'd agree with you on practically all of your CCS - though violeteves' take on SxS is a refreshing, if incredibly angsty, breath of fresh air.