Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe My rating: 5 of 5 stars No idea why it took me so long to get around to reading this. It felt good to read something that portrayed slavery in the United States where the slaves were both treated as property and subhuman. Books like Gone With the Wind treat…
The Painted Bird by Jerzy KosiÅ„ski My rating: 4 of 5 stars I chose to read this book for Banned Books Week 2013. A quote from that September 14th blog post: In tenth grade, this book was assigned to us. It was the most difficult book I had read to that point, but it was…
Additional thinking about Compiled List of Challenged Books 2008-2012 made me copy Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009 and do the same markup as indicated below. Those I have already read are in bold. That appears to be fourteen. Those already on my to-read list are in underlined. That appears to be eight. Those I just have no interest or failed…
Comments on my Banned Books Week 2013 post yesterday via Facebook made me wonder which of the books recently challenged according the American Library Association’s data I have actually read or plan on reading. So I compiled the 2008-2102 top 10 challenged books for 2008 through 2012 (five years) and sorted and de-duplicated the list.…
Censorship is alive and well in the United States. Someone will object to something in any book. But it takes amazing gall to prevent others from reading what one does not like. Banned Books Week this year, 2013, is September 22-28. I just received my copy of The Painted Bird a few days ago. I plan to…
Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was more a series of short stories from starting point of Dorothy acquiring new friends, the Wizard, and a series of unfortunate events. They travel from realm to realm encountering strange peoples. Definitely a Baum book. My favorite…
The Crippled God by Steven Erikson My rating: 4 of 5 stars For a couple years a coworker told me to read this series. I bought the first book, but it sat on the shelf as a reminder. Finally, I caved, and he gave me the rest of the series. It started off confusing and…
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings by James Weldon Johnson My rating: 4 of 5 stars As a mixed race man, though much darker of skin color, some people easily identify me as Black. Others have no clue and try to figure it out with, “Where are you from?” as though no…
Attila: King of the Huns: The Man and the Myth by Patrick Howarth My rating: 3 of 5 stars A woman asked me about a quarter into this book, “What is the one thing about Attila that I should care?” Now that I have finished, I still do not know the answer. Go read about…