We're constrained by the size of the poll ;)

Many, many books are missing from here -- it's a depressingly fruitful area of search ("banned science fiction"), but the poll system has a finite number of choices, whicih is one reason (of several) that we know the polls aren't very scientific, and like to provide some "opt-out" choices. Like most things on Slashdot, the posted part is just the kernel, hoped / intended to spark conversation, including comments about what's wrong with any given post (whether on the front page or here in the polls).

In short, you're right about Narnia, and raise an interesting point re: His Dark Materials.

A bit on that ...

When people make these lists (namecalling "censorship" or "banning"), they often stray toward the site that (depending on your viewpoint) you might consider "cautious," or "paranoid and misguided." If a privately funded school decides not to buy, or to remove from circulation, any particular book or author, are they "censoring"? Or just exercising discretion? That kind of distinction is the downside to claims of oppression -- some of them come off as "Boy Who Cried Wolf." I would be happy if every school library stocked The Anarchist Cookbook, but I don't *expect* it. Similarly, if I had a child in kindergarten, there are books that I'd be a little off-put by saw them on the shelf, just because not everything is appropriate (for some values of appropriate) at every age. Everyone's list for what books those might be might vary quite a bit ... would be an interesting excercise to figure out the answer from a wide range of people, with a list of options including titles that are

- really racy stuff (Fanny Hill? Things even more explicit?)
- "classics" of what might be called hate literature. ("Mein Kampf")
- perhaps gross-out traumatic (has The Human Centipede had a child-audience book version yet?)
- just crass (I know I read a lot of books collecting low-brow humor as a kid, much of which might make me chuckle but that I wouldn't repeat in public)
(etc.)