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To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
Farenheit 451
1984
Animal Farm
Watership Down
Slaughterhouse Five
Time enough for Love
Friday
Ender's Game
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand*
Liberal Fascism - Jonah Goldberg**
Quantum Healing - Deepak Chopra**
Dianetics - L. Ron Hubbard**
Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole**
I'm pretty good at forgetting even the books I deeply enjoyed, so this is a really hard exercise. I think I'll leave it there.
*** This criterion excludes arguably far more bannable books, e.g., the Left Behind series, Lyndon Larouche's So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics, Robert James Waller's Bridges of Madison County, the Bible or the Koran (these last two being actually fascinating to read, given the way history's panned out), and on and on.
I'd ban books that I think are plausibly dangerous. Turner Diaries and the Anarchist Cookbook. I think there is at least a weak case for the banning of those books, but a case at the very least. Banning books which contain ideas you think are stupid or you simply don't agree with is silly; I believe John Stuart Mill on that one at least. Books which actively encourage hatred, revolution and violence; I think there is a much better case for banning those.
For a local ban: no strong preference.
For a general ban: Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near."
Then I'd start hunting down your readers, one IP address at a time....
Any book titled" Chicken Soup for the xxx Soul"
Disaster Capitalism-not because I believe that lefty ideas should be suppressed, but because thinking that sloppy should.
Annoying.
I suspect that banning certain types of books would cause the authors to try to spread their ideas through other forms of media, especially at a grassroots level. People would hope to consume more of those ideas (see: the Prohibition). It would also discount the value of unbanned books, because they would be seen as tame or uninspiring. Thus, I would ban books whose ideas I hope would become populist: science and classical liberalism.
Then I would set my sights on general woo: The Secret, Chopra, The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Bad pop nonfiction like Louise Brizendine's The Female Brain and anything by Naomi Klein.
Oh, and Crime and Punishment. One of my all-time most-hated. "Without God anything is permitted" my a**.
I could not but help going after books I feel actually harm the world, either through misinformation that causes people to harm themselves, or by subtracting intelligence from the universe.
So:
Kevin Trudeau books, and similar completely bogus health books that encourage you to eschew modern medicine and engage in witch doctory instead.
Naomi Klein and her ilk, who simply lie to support a pre-envisioned dystopian world view that they then want us to act on. Like with Kevin Trudeau books, following their prescriptions for a better world would lead to harm, except in their case, harm on a global scale.
The IQ of the universe was at least two points higher before Ms. Klein arrived on the scene...
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Collected Works, Joseph Stalin
Every book with the word "afrocentric" in it's title that isn't immediately followed by the word "bullshit".
Of course I haven't read it, but I find those that have extremely annoying.
This has revealed an authoritarian streak in me.
Golly, this sounds like a great business plan...
But then, I think the "lame" resistance to counterfactuals is not lame at all. It's usually the counterfactuals that are lame. If you find it annoying that some people don't respond according to your preferences, then find a different technique.
"an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!"
Ban 'em all.
If people want to read books, they can buy them themselves.