Comments on: I’ve been tagged with ‘Have you read these banned books?’ http://blog.xanthippas.com/2009/05/26/ive-been-tagged-with-have-you-read-these-banned-books/ A place for raw, uncensored ideas to be hurled about, recklessly... Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:42:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: juggernaut http://blog.xanthippas.com/2009/05/26/ive-been-tagged-with-have-you-read-these-banned-books/#comment-1372 Thu, 28 May 2009 22:20:25 +0000 http://blog.xanthippas.com/?p=1627#comment-1372 I’ve only read one of the fiction books that you had mentioned: Animal Farm, which wasn’t bad at all, but was not nearly as good as his essays.

Some of them you listed I am interested in reading, but most of what I read is nonfiction.

I do feel a sense of irony that many of the books which were banned in libraries resurfaced as classics of American literature.

Xanthippa says:

I, too, prefer non-fiction books to fiction ones… with some serious exceptions!

There are some books which are important to know, because they are part of the ‘cultural common knowledge’: ‘Animal Farm’ is one of them, as are ‘Dune’, ‘Hitch Hikers Guide’ series, and a whole slew of others. And, a lot of them are actually really good at using fiction in order to bring attention to real, non-fictional problems in our society…

I particularly like Mark Twain, Frank Herbert and Douglas Adams… and, from historical novelists, I REALLY like Mika Waltari.

Mika Waltari was a Finish writer, who became famous despite writing in a language very few people understood or cared about…he was brilliant at describing real historical events (with a lot of the ‘root causes’ that lead to them) through the eyes of a main character that was so naive and honest and intelligent-yet-not-street-smart… his main characters could all be diagnosed as ‘Aspies’, I am sure!

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