Banned Books

I found this list on the Simply Bluestocking blog and thought I'd share it. (Note: the blog author was NOT advocating banning books.) You can all go through & see how many of these you've read & write a nice, interesting post about it! There are a lot of different lists of banned books. I don't know where this one originated but I like it because it has a wide range of books and it is nice & long so it looks like I wrote a long post!

What I don't understand is the criteria for adding books to a banned books list. I mean some I understand -- I don't agree, I don't believe books should be banned at all -- but at least I can understand the reasoning. Others just escape me entirely. Little House on the Prairie??? Come on, what possible reason is there to ban that? I truly hate it when I can't find some sense in things. I'd like to point out that I never stopped Jill from reading anything & look how she turned out. Oh, bad example. Anyway --- have some fun, liven up your life - read a banned book this week!

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Hope for Aging Brains

This is from an article in The New York Times.

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

Poetry Day

I've decided to make Wednesday a poetry day. Every Wednesday I'll post a poem with a little information about the poet. You will be tested at some point in the future (just kidding, I think). I don't have a clever name like I came up with for Silent Sunday-- if anyone has an idea let me know. So here you go: the first official poetry day poem is from Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. During her life she rarely traveled outside of Amherst and earned a reputation for being eccentric. She wrote nearly 1800 poems but published fewer than a dozen during her life. This is one of my favorites.

The Soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

Robin, the lonely blog mistress

Volunteers Wanted

I've been pouring my heart and soul into this blog trying to come up with exciting ideas to retain the interest of my loyal readers. Ok, it's late, I guess I should go to bed before I become maudlin. Seriously though I really would like other people to do more posting. So I came up with this great idea. I have a Sunday theme and I'm sure you are all going to be pleasantly surprised at the theme I thought up for Wednesday. (I got this idea while riding my exercise bike today. I get a lot of ideas when I'm riding or walking - rarely does anyone else think they are as good as I do.)

Anyway, back to my story. I was thinking that people could volunteer to take a certain day of the week and post something that day on a regular basis. Anyone can, of course, post anytime they want but it would be nice to have a few people who would commit to a regular post. This would take all the stress and pressure out of my life and I would be a happy, cheerful person. And if you believe that I have a bridge for sale. If you are interested in taking on this challenging task, kindly email me with the day you would like. As you no doubt realize from my posts, it is not all that difficult to think of something to say. Just babble on for awhile and the next thing you know you have an entire post written!

Robin, the lonely blog mistress

John McCain

This is an interesting article about John McCain from the New York Review of Books. Read carefully, I'm trying to do my part to influence your vote in November!

Robin, the lonely blog mistress

I'm a Little Slow but

I get there eventually. It just occurred to me that in January of this year Stephen started the Bury My Sister at St. Paul's Fund. I'm sure that everyone has been making a substantial monthly contribution so there must be a lot of money in it by now. I thought of this because I posted a picture yesterday that I took in front of St. Paul's Cathedral. I was looking at the picture & thinking I'd like to go back & I hope that I don't have to wait until it is time for me to be buried there (since I'd be dead & wouldn't really enjoy it). That made me think about the fund. THEN I realized - Stephen is in Europe. I bet he went on the proceeds from MY burial fund. As soon as he returns I'm going to demand an audit of the fund. I think everyone who contributed should write to him & demand their money back.

So what did we learn from this post? (Pick one)

1. Robin is very bored.
2. Robin was desperate for something to post about.
3. Robin is delusional if she thinks anyone contributed to her fund.
   
4. Stephen is an embezzler.
5. I (meaning you, the reader) had better post something interesting before it gets even worse.
6. All of the above.

Robin, the lonely blog mistress (who will probably have to be buried in the backyard now)

Silent Sunday

This was taken in front of St. Paul's Cathedral in London!