10 Books That Were Banned For All The Wrong Reasons

It’s almost hard to believe that books are still being banned in the world. Aside from a crackpot dictatorship or genuinely sensible reasons, such as keeping Stephen King’s Cujo out of preschools, you’d think we’d have moved past such an archaic form of censorship by now. But alas, the times have yet to be a’changing. And while some reasons for banning a book make at least a little sense, these explanations are just baffling.

It’s almost hard to believe that books are still being banned in the world. Aside from a crackpot dictatorship or genuinely sensible reasons, such as keeping Stephen King’s Cujo out of preschools, you’d think we’d have moved past such an archaic form of censorship by now. But alas, the times have yet to be a’changing. And while some reasons for banning a book make at least a little sense, these explanations are just baffling.

10 James And The Giant Peach – A Sexual Spider James and the Giant Peach Dahl, Roald Best Price: $1.06 Buy New $3.98 (as of 12:45 UTC - Details)

James and the Giant Peach is pretty rough for a children’s book. It has smoking, swearing, violence, and all kinds of mature themes that usually don’t appear in kids’ books, but the overarching message is one of friendship and learning to face your fears.

The story is about a young boy named James who was taken in by his two mean, abusive aunts after his parents were killed by a rhinoceros. An old man then gives James a magic potion, which he accidentally spills onto a peach tree and a few bugs. A giant peach grows, the insects learn to talk, and they all have a grand adventure high above the Atlantic Ocean.

All said and done, James and the Giant Peach is number 50 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books between 1990 and 1999, right behind Cujo and a few spots ahead of American Psycho.

Why has it been banned? Just about any reason you can think of—including the promotion of communism—but the most absurd has to be the reason given in 1986 when the book was banned from a town in Wisconsin. According to the town, a passage in which Miss Spider licks her lips was just a little too risque for their tastes. As reported by The Times of London, that action could be “taken in two ways, [one of them] sexual.”

1984 – Not Communist Enough Where the Sidewalk Ends Silverstein, Shel Best Price: $3.47 Buy New $12.00 (as of 11:10 UTC - Details)

If James and the Giant Peach is steeped in veiled praise for communism, George Orwell’s 1984 is apparently drenched in it. In 1981, it was challenged in Jackson County, Florida, for its alleged pro-communism message, and it’s seen its fair share of controversy around the world. Published in 1949, it’s the hallmark story of an oppressive government that uses surveillance and manipulation to keep its population in check.

But if the fine folks in Florida were right, then one ban came from a surprising place. From the moment 1984 was translated into Russian, the Soviet Union placed a blanket ban on the novel and burned all the copies they could get their hands on. Why? It wasn’t communist enough for Stalin’s liking. Apparently, he saw what most others couldn’t: Among other things, the book was an attack on Stalin’s brand of communism, and just like Big Brother in the novel, Stalin wasn’t too big on criticism.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Magic Fingers And God’s Fly

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is the kind of book that you either love or hate. If you piece the right parts together, you’ll get the story of Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience at the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, which he survived by the dubious luck of being imprisoned in a meat locker at the time. Anne Frank: The Diary ... Frank, Anne Best Price: $0.99 Buy New $3.50 (as of 01:25 UTC - Details)

But the protagonist of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, is also “unstuck in time,” which means that the book makes precious little chronological sense. One minute, he’s in his mansion after the war getting massaged to sleep by a Magic Fingers machine attached to his bed. The next moment, he’s in the past in an alien zoo being forced to make love to a porn star for the Trafalmadorians’ entertainment.

It’s for scenes like the latter that the novel is usually banned. It’s been cited for obscene language, explicit sexual scenes, and “an act of bestiality.” If you’re talking about, say, middle schoolers, those are decent reasons to at least question a book’s merits for that age group.

But in 1985, a high school in Owensboro, Kentucky, threw logic out the window and banned Slaughterhouse-Five for the aforementioned “Magic Fingers” passages. For context, the Magic Fingers was a machine that simply vibrated the main character’s bed because he was depressed and had trouble sleeping. It would “jiggle him while he wept.” Compared to forced copulation for the pleasure of extraterrestrials, that seems a little benign.

But the Owensboro school didn’t stop there. They also made sure to mention that they didn’t like one particular sentence out of the entire novel: “The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty.”

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