This Top 5 Wednesday post is supposed to be all about gateway books into your favorite genre. However, because it’s Banned Books Week, we’re going to do things a little different. The science fiction books on this list are very naughty. So naughty, in fact, that people have either challenged them, or outright succeeded in getting them banned in various places. I guess you could consider them your gateway into being a bookworm rebel. Are you rebel enough to read some of these badly behaved books?
Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly book meme, done by most book bloggers and booktubers. It’s started out by Lainey, but is now hosted by Sam at Thoughts On Tomes. Here’s the Goodreads group if you want to join in!
Badly Behaved Books
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: butts, boobs, racism, questioned/bashed religion, and sexual activities.
Reasons: Bad language and questioned/bashed religion.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Reasons: Nekkid people! NEKKID PEOPLE! (For a further ranting on this, please see this post.)
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Reasons: Dirty words. LOTS and lots of dirty words. Because we all know only uneducated heathens that are damned to the pits of hell let loose with a good f bomb every now and then.
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Reasons: People doing naughty things, questioning/bashing religion, and obviously too mature for its age range.
So, what have we learned from this Top 5 Wednesday about Badly Behaved Books?
Well, we’ve primarily learned that a good bit of religious people absolutely can’t stand to have religion questioned (not all, though. Some of y’all are actually pretty cool.) That daring to not bow down at the feet of your continent’s primary divine being is a horrible, awful, no good, very bad thing. (Honestly, I don’t have much of a problem with religion itself. I have a problem with religious zealots who do stupid crap like try to get books banned because they don’t toe their particular line.)
We’ve also learned that dirty words are an absolute no-no! It doesn’t matter that little Johnny’s probably heard at least your basic 3 Staples of Cursing by the time he’s ten. Oh, no… no chance of that. His mind has been untouched by the depravity of such words and it must stay that way!
(For the record: I have the mouth of a sailor, and have never restricted it around my daughter. She refuses to curse (not that I’ve ever tried to make her.) It cracks me up, especially since she knows I have no problem with her cursing as long as it’s used appropriate to her situation. So a stubbed toe that elicits a “D*mmit!” would be perfectly fine for me, but a casual “So this sonuva…” in conversation would not be.)
Have you ever read any of these badly behaved books?
So, three out of five, the three oldest, of course. (I am practicing my uncool.) I’m looking through my bookshevles to see what else might be banned. Quite a bit, with sex being the most likely reason (as in Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, a nice ghost story). Religious deviancy would definitely take out Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Paul Cornwall’s London Falling would probably get it for demonology, magic, and superstition.
That would be a fun experiment! I might have to do that for banned books week next year. Go through my shelves and play devil’s advocate for why some of them should be banned!
I definitely agree with you. People who try to force their beliefs on you aren’t cool.