The Lord of the Flies

So I finished it. What a scary story. I read this in high school, but not since then. I didn't see the movie, but I bet it was really creepy. I can imagine this on film. The heat, the sweat. The cute little British boys turning into savages...And it was so easy, that slide into lawlessness. It's very disturbing.
But really, what did I think would happen when I reread this story? Would I suddenly understand why people would want to ban it? The fact that someone wanted to ban it, doesn't make it more than it is.
I'm not any smarter than I was before. Shoot.

The Shame...

of starting a blog and then not adding to it!  Oh, the laziness!  Oh well.  There has been a public request for the list of books I am reading.  So here it is:

1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

6. Ulysses, James Joyce

7. Beloved, Toni Morrison

8. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding

9. 1984, George Orwell

10. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

11. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

12. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

13. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

14. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

15. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

16. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

17. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

18. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

20. Sond of Solomon, Toni Morrison

21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

22. Native Son, Richard Wright

23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

24. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

25. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

26. The Call of the Wild, Jack London

27. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

28. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

29. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

30. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

31. Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawerence

32. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

33. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

34. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

35. Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence

36. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

37. A Separate Peace, John Knowles

38. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

39. Women in Love, DH Lawrence

40. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

41. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

42. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

43. Rabbit Run, John Updike

Many of these I have read before. But I'll read them again to see if I can understand why people would want to ban them.  

My Own Private Windmill

      I have never lived in a community where books were banned.   Or maybe I have and never payed attention.  I don't understand banning or burning books.  I really don't get it.  Soon it will be Banned Books Week and I thought it would be cool to read some of those banned books.  Let's see what the big todo is all about.  I googled banned books and came up with some serious listage.  Wikipedia has a huge list of books banned around the world since the dawn of man. That's too many for me.  So I picked this list: "Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century".  Sweet.  And, I thought I'd blog about this experience.  We'll see how it goes.  Stay tuned...