List Challenge's Banned Children's Book List

Oh I just love this list! It's perfect for Banned Books Week which has just finished. And competitive reader me loved that with my score of 25/60 I came 171st of 956 readers when I took the quiz last week. I wish it was more, I have come perilously close to reading more of these books. Quite a few are sitting waiting, unread, in my house. 

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak

The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - Alvin Schwartz

In the Night Kitchen - Maurice Sendak

The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Paterson

Olive's Ocean - Kevin Henkes

Julie of the Wolves - Jean Craighead George

Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh (see my review)

The Diary of a Young Girl  - Anne Frank (see my review)

A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein

Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein

Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume (see my review)

My Brother Sam is Dead - James Lincoln Collier & Christopher Collier

The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier (see my review)

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 - Christopher Paul Curtis

James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl (see my review)

The Witches - Roald Dahl (see my review)

If I Ran the Zoo - Dr Seuss

Where's Waldo/Wally - Martin Handford

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle (see my review)

The Giver - Lois Lowry (see my review)

The Adventures of Captain Underpants - Dav Pilkey

Heather Has Two Mommies - Leslea Newman, Diana Souza (illustrator)

And Tango Makes Three - Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (see my review)

Junie B. Jones - Barbara Park

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerers Stone - J.K. Rowling

Bone - Jeff Smith

Goosebumps - R.L. Stine

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Mildred Taylor (see my review)

Drama - Raina Telgemeier (see my review)

Dragonwings - Laurence Yep

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging - Louise Rennison

The Rabbit's Wedding - Garth Williams

Shooter - Walter Dean Myers

The Fighting Ground - Avi

Shade's Children - Garth Nix

The Upstairs Room - Johnna Reiss

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie (see my review)

Go Ask Alice - Anonymous

Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher

Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky (see my review)

Looking for Alaska - John Green

Two Boys Kissing - David Levithan

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (see my review)

Gossip Girl - Cecily von Ziegesar

Twilight - Stephanie Meyer

Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld

Ttyl - Lauren Myracle

The Earth, My Butt and Other BIG Round Things - Carolyn Mackler

Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers

The Face on the Milk Carton - Caroline B. Cooney

Forever ..... - Judy Blume

Draw Me a Star - Eric Carle

25/60

This list has the requisite books I've already read, books I want to read, and books I've never heard of (quite a few actually). I should go read one just to annoy some book banner types.

Top Ten(ish) Books I Read in 2013 (A Year in Books 2013)

Top Ten Tuesday is a great weekly meme from the folks at The Broke and the Bookish. 

It's always fun to look back on the reading year, and ponder the best of the year. A tradition I started in 2011, and continued in 2012. 

This makes three Top Ten Tuesday posts in a row! A personal best effort. 

This year I gave 11 books 5 stars on goodreads. 


My year started with a bang. Possibly my favourite book of the year. Lois Lowry's The Giver. 

David Weisner's Flotsam was a reread, still worth each and every one of its 5 stars. 

Janet Hunt's E3 Call Home is a great bird book. It seems I've been meaning to do a post about this one all year. 

Susan Hill's Howard's End is on the Landing was a surprise package for me. It was fantastic. 

Jackie French made yet another appearance in my books of the year with A Day to Remember. 

It seems Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project was a favourite for pretty much everyone who read it, I was no exception.

Joan Lindsay's Australian classic Picnic at Hanging Rock was everything I hoped it would be. 

It's always a pleasure to read Sonya Hartnett. This year I read her stunning Thursday's Child. 

I also love a lost cat story. Caroline Paul's Lost Cat. 

Patrick Ness's incredible, moving masterpiece, A Monster Calls. 

I read two books by David Walliams this year, Billionaire Boy was certainly my favourite. 

Rick Gekoski Tolkien's Gown another gem that remains unblogged, but certainly worth searching out. As I suspect are his other books. 

4 Aussie titles

2 picture books

5 nonfiction/memoir titles

7 female authors

5 male authors

Gathering Blue

I read The Giver for the first time a few weeks ago and I loved it, really loved it.  I was very excited to find that there were three sequels. Sadly my library only has this one.

I'm not sure that Gathering Blue is actually a sequel to The Giver. It's thematically linked for sure- another young person battling a dystopian world of the future, but it's a completely separate story to The Giver. Different dystopia, different characters. Is that a sequel? Not for me.

Gathering Blue is the tale of Kira, a young girl, recently orphaned as we meet her. The first page describes in rather harrowing detail how Kira has just spent 4 days sitting by her dead mother in the "vast foul smelling Field of Leaving". It's a cracking start.

"Mother?" 

There was no reply. She hadn't expected one. Her mother had been dead now for four days, and Kira could tell that the last of the spirit was drifting away. 

"Mother." She said it again, quietly, to whatever was leaving. She thought that she could feel its leave-taking, the way one could feel a small whisper of breeze at night. 

Now she was all alone. Kira felt the aloneness, the uncertainty, and a great sadness.

 On each of the following pages of the first chapter we learn further terrible happenings in Kira's life- she has lost much more than her mother, orphaned, homeless, she has a bad leg, and no food, and yet she has survived in her own way, and even managed to make her own mark on her village.

Kira's mother had a special role within the community even though she was quite poor- she had a talent with embroidery and knew the art of dye, and she was called upon to restore ceremonial garments for the village. But now Kira's mother is dead, she is quite alone, and must make her own way.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge this book as falling in the shadow of The Giver, but I think it does, and it lead to an inevitable disappointment for me. I was expecting a sequel, and it's not. I loved The Giver so much, and so I found this one a little lacking. Checking out reviews on Goodreads I see that I'm not alone. For me Gathering Blue didn't have the pace, excitement or tension of The Giver. Still some of the ideas and writing is great, and I'm definitely planning to read more Lois Lowry.

The Giver

Wow. Just wow.

A much lauded novel, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1994, controversial and moving so it still frequently appears on banned book lists. It's still read and loved too though, coming in a #4 on School Library Journal's Top 100 Children's Novels 2012.

Anita Silvey in her Children's Book-A-Day Almanac describes it as the best children's novel of the 1990s, and one of the best science fiction works of all time. While I'm not sure that I think of it as science fiction, it's a dystopian vision of the future certainly, but I guess I need robots and aliens to make me comfortable with the science fiction tag (even though I know that the sci-fi folks don't necessarily see it that way). The Giver was said to be one of the first dystopian stories, paving the way for recent blockbusters such as The Hunger Games and Matched.

It's hard to know what to say about this book without spoiling it for those who may not have read it yet. Jonas is an 11 year old boy living in a future community when we meet him at the start of the book, living a comfortable life with his parents and younger sister. But it's coming up to December and he's becoming anxious about his upcoming Ceremony of Twelve when he will be assigned his future job.

The Giver is a deceptively simple, but beguilingly complex and powerful story. Lois Lowry shows us the importance of memory, history, love, wisdom and a bond with nature in an extraordinary and moving way.

In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal (best read after reading the book) Lois Lowry talks of how the roots of The Giver formed in experiences extending back to her own childhood and later experiences as an adult.

In beginning to write The giver I created – as I always do, in every book– a world that existed only in my imagination – the world of “only us, only now.” I tried to make Jonas’s world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way. It did feel good, that world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike; all the violence, prejudice, poverty, and injustice, and I even threw in good manners as a way of life because I liked the idea of it.

I think that perhaps The Giver will be up among my favourite books of the year. Which is great, but also a bit depressing to think that you might have peaked too early with the first book you've actually read for 2013. I know I will reread this book.

198/1001