Get Rewarded for Reading a Banned Book

The Oceanside Public Library is having a Banned Book Challenge this month as a way to celebrate our freedom to read. 

Through September 30 if you read a Banned or Challenged Book and post a review through the library website, you can pick up an “I Read Banned Books” mug at Oceanside Public Library, officials wrote in a news release.

The Mission Branch, at 3861-B Mission Avenue, and the Civic Center Branch, at 330 N. Coast Highway are participating. 

As part of the Banned Books Celebration, we will also have a Banned Book craft on Wednesday, September 25, at 5:30 p.m.  On Friday, September 27, at 5:00 p.m., we will have an additional book craft with Banned Book Readouts and refreshments.  We will be reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and each participant will take turns reading aloud.  Both of these Banned Book events will be held at Civic Center Library at 330 N. Coast Highway in downtown Oceanside.   

To register for the program, follow the Banned Book Challenge link from their website. All events are free and open to the public and sponsored by the Friends of the Oceanside Public Library.

Below is a partial list of books that have challenged or banned compiled by the American Library Association:

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• Ulysses, by James Joyce
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison
• The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• 1984, by George Orwell
• Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Native Son, by Richard Wright
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
• All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
• Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
• A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
• The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
• Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
• Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
• Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
• Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
• Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
• Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
• The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
• Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
• An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
• Rabbit, Run, by John Updike