I like more trouble

The American Library Association has a list of the “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000”. The grey level indicates how sure I am that I’ve read the book.

• 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 6. Of Mice and Men
• 13. The Catcher in the Rye
• 22. A Wrinkle in Time
• 25. In the Night Kitchen
• 47. Flowers for Algernon
• 52. Brave New World
• 69. Slaughterhouse-Five
• 70. Lord of the Flies
• 84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It’s significant that in this list, unlike the list of “dangerous books”, I’m certain I’ve read all but one of them, and that I’ve read the entire book. Sendak’s book was published years after I’d grown out of its intended audience; I know I’ve seen it but I’m not sure I’ve read it. The same goes for many of the other children’s and young people’s books on the list. For Sex Ed, I went right to the sources: the Larousse Mythology, the Kama Sutra, Kinsey, Candy…

Why on earth are A Wrinkle in Time and Flowers for Algernon on the list? Don’t the meddling idiots of this world have better things to do? —Though I suppose that banning innocuous books is just the sort of thing a meddling idiot would do.

Both books are very much worth reading, by the way. Algernon is perhaps better known as the movie Charly with Cliff Robertson. Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle was where I first learned the word ‘tesseract’; not long after I read Hinton’s Fourth dimension and did a science fair project on it, building hypercubes and hypertetrahedra from bamboo skewers.