Member-only story
My Favorite Challenged Book
Choosing, sadly, out of so many
After all, it could be Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale or the sequel, The Testaments. It could be my teen favorites The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. After all, a parent I knew DID try to petition other parents to keep us from learning about Holden Caulfield’s search for authenticity and some sort of reason for carrying on.
It could be something I will be teaching soon: a novel by Carter Sickels or Silas House, or that memoir by Lara Jane Grace, Tranny.
Maybe my favorite banned book is also my very favorite novel — the one about an older, married man and a younger single man roaming the streets and shores in the environs of Dublin, circa 1904, searching in part for each other. That it uses another epic, The Odyssey, as its sourceful inspiration, and that anyone seeking to find obscenity and sexual arousal in its pages would have to have the patience of Abraham Lincoln to achieve such arousal, makes me love Joyce’s Ulysses even more than I do. And sure, there is self-love abounding, especially in the last chapter (Molly Bloom’s post-midnight soliloquy), and call me crazy, but I don’t find myself getting excited in that way when I read it.
I knew Ulysses had been banned when I first read it in graduate school, and so, as much as I thought about…