The history of books getting banned - whether by governments, by churches, etc. - is rich and sometimes strange. Some of the books we consider harmless today have at one time or another been banned. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman? A sweet old man singing poems to himself in the woods is banned for being “obscene literature” ? And what about the Arabian Nights, or the Canterbury Tales? You won’t know until you read them yourself.

With other books it’s clear why they were banned: The Communist Manifesto, for political reasons, and the Memoirs of Fanny Hill? Well, it was pornographic then, and it still is. Regardless of where they stand, we have some great works that were at one point or another deemed “too hot to handle.” Like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Joyce’s Ulysses, or the wonderful Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio.