Banned Books

Yahoo news has a report of the Top 25 most challenged books of the last decade. By challenged, these books contain themes, ideas, and words that result in either books being pulled from local library shelves or books that are forbidden to be read in the classrooms.

Banning books is a tricky thing. Sure, we want to protect folks from ideas that harm and yet, there is also a good justification for reading those ideas so that we can know what we're either for or against. And, it's also a great non-confrontational way to hear opinions that are different fromwhat we already hold. This way we can weight the necessary ideas and find ourselves grappling or rejecting beliefs that challenge us. And, we might just find ourselves learning in the process.

Here are the Top 25 challenged books:

1. "Harry Potter" (Series) (J.K. Rowling)
2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee)
3. "The Color Purple" (Alice Walker)
4. "The Outsiders" (S.E. Hinton)
5. "Lord of the Flies" (William Golding)
6. "Of Mice and Men" (John Steinbeck)
7. "Goosebumps" (Series) (R.L. Stine)
8. "How to Eat Fried Worms" (Thomas Rockwell)
9. "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger)
10. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain)
11. "The Giver" (Lois Lowry)
12. "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley)
13. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain)
14. "Captain Underpants" (Dav Pilkey)
15. "The Anarchist Cookbook" (William Powell)
16. "Carrie" (Stephen King)
17. "Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes)
18. "The Dead Zone" (Stephen King)
19. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (Maya Angelou)
20. "Go Ask Alice" (anonymous)
21. "American Psycho" (Bret Easton Ellis)
22. "The Chocolate War" (Robert Cormier)
23. "James and the Giant Peach" (Roald Dahl)
24. "The Pigman" (Paul Zindel)
25. "A Wrinkle in Time" (Madeleine L'Engle)

You can read the Top 100 challenged books here.