The Ups and Downs of Blogging

A week or two ago, I came across a blog post in which a woman debated the merits of correcting people on the internet. She was referring to things that are easily checked with a quick search on the internet. I was sympathetic to what she had to say having five minutes earlier just corrected someone who claimed that there had been no slavery in Canada. Although it was never an integral part of the economy, a quick search on the internet will bring you to a page on Wikipedia with a brief summary. I already knew this fact because my ex-husband’s cousin had done research on their family and had it privately printed in a book, which I read. One of their ancestors had owned a slave. Also, I once watched a documentary on CBC about blacks in Canada. Slavery in Canada was mentioned. Although my ex-husband’s ancestor was not mentioned by name, the slave he had owned, Olivier le Jeune, was.

However, if you’ve ever gotten into a dispute on the internet, you probably know that even fetching easy to find links is time-consuming. If you’re trying to find reliable information on something a little more controversial, as I was doing earlier today (well, yesterday morning), it can be quite time-consuming. So I wound up not putting up the post I intended to put up today:

Banned Books Week: What Should I Read?

The Bible	x
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes	x
The Koran
Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Arabian Nights
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer	x
Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne	x
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman	x
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe	x
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli	x
Diary of Anne Fank, Anne Frank	x
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert	x
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Dracula, Bram Stoker	x
Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Book of Common Prayer, The Church of England
Essays, Michel de Montaigne
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon	x
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin	x
Ulysses, James Joyce
Animal Farm, George Orwell	x
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio	x
Candide, Voltaire	x
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Analects, Confucius
Dubliners, James Joyce
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck	x
Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Red and the Black, Stendhal	x
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle	x
Capital, Karl Marx
Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire	x
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley	x
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
Jungle, Upton Sinclair	x
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Lord of the Flies, William Golding	x
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque	x
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx	x
Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Diary Samuel Pepys
Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak
Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant	x
Praise of Folly Desiderius Erasmus
Praise of Folly Desiderius Erasmus
East of Eden John Steinbeck
Catch-22 Joseph Heller	x
Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe	x
Color Purple Alice Walker	x
Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger	o
Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm X
Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke
Bluest Eye Toni Morrison	x
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison	x
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou	x
Leviathan Thomas Hobbes	x
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bridge to Terabithia Katherine Paterson
Confessions Jean Jacques Rousseau
Gargantua and Pantagruel François Rabelais
Women in Love D. H. Lawrence
Social Contract Jean Jacques Rousseau
American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
Separate Peace John Knowles
Bell Jar Sylvia Plath	x
Talmud
Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler
James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl
Red Pony John Steinbeck
Popol Vuh
Metaphysics Aristotle
Satyricon Petronius
Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith
Little House on the Prairie Laura Ingalls Wilder
Institutes of the Christian Religion Jean Calvin
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov	x
Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut
Clan of the Cave Bear Jean M. Auel	x
Black Boy Richard Wright	x
Spirit of the Laws Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
Julie of the Wolves Jean Craighead George
Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse
Power and the Glory Graham Greene
Black Like Me John Howard Griffin
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble William Steig
Sanctuary William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood

Didn’t like the list over at the website of the organization that’s promoting Banned Books Week. Actually, if you read the fine print, it’s banned and “challenged” books. This is a different list from the one promoted by Banned Books Week. I found it over at OCLC. It’s a list of books that are on both their “Top 1000” list and have been frequently challenged, so it contains more classics. Still, I thought it might be fun to read something but I haven’t decided what yet. Pardon me for getting lazy with the formatting halfway down the list. Actually, there’s 120 books on the list and I’ve only typed the first ninety-nine. The ones with an “x”, I’ve already read.

Now, suddenly, I’ve been doing some reading on nutrition and my reading plans for the week may have changed. Still, if you’ve read any of the books I haven’t and would like to make a plug for them, please go ahead.