LIBRARY
ENG 110: How to Write Well (Sultenfuss): Banned Books Week
Banned Books Week
Banned Books Week
The first official Recharge with Reading event will be Banned Books Week, taking place September 26-October 3 of 2020. This annual event promoted by the American Library Association celebrating banned and challenged books and the history surrounding them. This year, to celebrate Banned Books Week, the Cannon Memorial Library is having volunteers read selections of their favorite banned pieces of literature. This page showcases readings and events from Banned Books Week, as well as ways you can get involved, and check out Banned Books available at the library! (You can read banned books all year round, can't you? Every day is a chance to celebrate that!) You can find out more about banned books and Banned Books Week here.
Banned Books Readings
Banned Book Readings from Saint Leo University Faculty and Staff
Note: This section will be updated with recordings and more information as more readings are planned and provided.
Alicia Corts - "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe: First published in 1843, Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," is told through the eyes of an unnamed narrator who believes the heart of the man he murdered is still beating beneath the floorboards of his home. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is often banned for its use of violent imagery and was famously banned in Virginia after protests that the story could "plant the seeds" of crime, depression, and disobedience in children.
Doris Vankampen-Breit - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien: Follow the Hobbits and their companions in the second book of the series as they strive to overcome evil and destroy the One Ring. This series has been banned as 'satanic' in some areas and was even burned by members of a church in New Mexico in 2001.
Delaney Rose - Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden: Annie On My Mind is the story of two best friends, Annie and Liza, who come from opposite social backgrounds and have their relationship challenged by society. Annie On My Mind has been extensively banned and was even publicly burned in the Kansas City school system in the early 90's for fear it would cause children to experiment with homosexuality. Despite this, it has never been out of print.
Michelle Joy - Northern Lights (Called The Golden Compass in the United States and some other countries) by Philip Pullman: The first book in a trilogy titled His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass centers around Lyra Belacqua, a young girl, and Pantalaimon, her daemon, as they attempt to locate and rescue her best friend, who has been abducted by a mysterious group Lyra and her friends refer to as "The Gobblers." The Golden Compass has been banned primarily for religious reasons, as Pullman's books make it clear he is not fond of the Catholic Church or the way God is sometimes used to justify violence against certain groups.
Banned Books: Short Readings by Faculty and Staff
As heard on SLU Radio!
More readers share their love for reading, below. Want to participate? Select a banned book, read and record a section of up to 2 minutes, and submit it for consideration to: doris.vankampen@saintleo.edu.
How You Can Get Involved
How You Can Get Involved
- Check Out Our Readings! As you know, Saint Leo University faculty and staff members have been recording readings from their favorite banned books! Simply click the link to hear our readings, and share your favorites!
- Record Your Own Readings, We'd Love to See! Do you have a favorite banned book? If so, we'd love to hear your reading too! Tag us in your readings on social media using #SLUREADS to twitter and Instagram, and Share in LionsShare! Let us know what your favorite banned book is, why, and read us a selection.
- Read a Banned Book! Now you know that the library has a lot of banned books available. Why not read one for yourself, and let us know you did! Tag us using #SLUREADS to twitter and Instagram, and Share in LionsShare! Let us know what you think of your new read!
Famously Banned Books in Our Collection
Banned Books (and eBooks) available to read
Check them out!
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Available as an eBook.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
1984 by Available as an eBook.
In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be. Lionel Trilling said of Orwell's masterpiece, "1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present." Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell's novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.
Animal Farm by Available as an eBook.
Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union.
Of Mice and Men by Available as an eBook.
They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.
The Handmaid's Tale by Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
Set in the near future, it describes life in what once was the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead. Reacting to social unrest, and a sharply declining birthrate, the new regime has reverted to -- even gone beyond -- the repressive tolerance of the original Puritans. Offred is a Handmaid who may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant because she is only valued as long as her ovaries are viable.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Available as an eBook.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
The Scarlet Letter by Available as an eBook.
When Hester Prynne, a young Puritan woman in seventeenth-century Boston, becomes pregnant out of wedlock, the unforgiving society in which she lives judges her harshly. Sentenced to wear a scarlet "A" emblazoned on her dress, Hester raises her daughter, Pearl, on the outskirts of town--an exile meant to cause her shame for the remainder of her life.
Fahrenheit 451 by Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Beloved by Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen.
Lolita by Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
