I am so very very off schedule – but this week’s late banned book Friday is two novels I would consider recent classics, frequently read in high school AP classes – both familiar to me – but, having read them many years ago, they were a difficult revisit – as they are intended to be.

In Beloved, Toni Morrison weaves a heartrending story of the suffering of Sethe, the main character, a formerly enslaved woman, and her family – including the ghost of the daughter she killed to save from a life of slavery.

This book tells of the tribulation of the entire family, living lives plagued by violence, fear, and isolation. With its graphic and intense scenes – to honestly convey the painful lives of these people – it has been subject to many book bans.

(I would note that we have already read another of Toni Morrison’s books, Song of Solomon, during week #11. Her books really seem to upset the book banning types.)

This week’s second read also appears frequently on banned book lists – Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Most people are familiar with the story of Celie in some form, if not the novel, then the celebrated 1985 film, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah, and Danny Glover.

I read the novel in the high school – but, with its themes of abuse and sexual violence, it was no less difficult to read again.

Alice Walker won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for this work in 1983 – and that anyone would argue it does not belong in circulation or that a high school AP student (taking a class for college credit) should not read it, is absurd.

The things that are difficult in these books are the things that most need to be communicated by them.

That is the point.

Wishing you all a lovely week and happy reading.

Be well, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other.

Grace and Blessings.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence

Animal Farm – George Orwell

1984 – George Orwell

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

A Separate Peace – John Knowles

Lolita – Vladmir Nabokov

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

LOTR – The Fellowship of The Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien

LOTR – The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien

LOTR – The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

Song of Soloman – Toni Morrison

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Beloved – Toni Morrison

The Color Purple – Alice Walker