Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Banned Books Week Day #5

Have you ever heard of "The Canon"?

I was taught that "The Canon" was a list of books that had long ago been deemed must reads. From the onset of its inception there has been criticism of what was and wasn't on the list, and there still is discontent. Since my days in the classroom have finished, I read for pleasure, and yet "The Canon" haunts me. I wonder if I've missed anything important and in my search for the list, I came across a website that notes the Western Canon by Harold Bloom The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages"].

Now, because it's Banned Books Week, I looked at the list not to see what I should read, but to see if anyone had challeneged any of these books. No surprise to find that they had. Here is a very small sampling of what I found:

Beowolf: A New Telling, by Robert Nye [challenged 1998]
The Cantebury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer [challenged 1995]
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain [challenged 2008]
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger [2008]

Interesting.

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