The Berkeley Summer Reading List, an annual waste of time for incoming Freshmen, has been announced. It was cute to watch the new students consciencly writing down the titles when they were announced when I went through CalSO two years ago, suffering from some ineffable feeling that they would be tested on this someday.

The theme this year is 'Banned and Challenged Books,' so of course the list is full of humdrum choices that are part of California's mandatory reading list.

Students are being invited to read a dozen "challenged" novels, books that someone sought to restrict or ban. The books were chosen by select UC Berkeley faculty and staff members off the American Library Association's list of the 100 most challenged books from 1990 to 2000.

"And usually when someone doesn't want you to read something, it means that there's something valuable in that book," advises the introduction to the list, distributed this week to fall freshmen.

So we're making decisions based on what a bunch of brainless Alabama rednecks don't want me to read? Isn't that kind of a reverse-reverse stupid? Why doesn't Berkeley go for a theme more highbrow and cultural then 'Morons and Racists don't like these.' ?

Here's the list:

1. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding
New York: Penguin Books, 1954, (c)1982

2. "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
New York: Dutton/Plume, 1987, (c)1977

3. "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger
Boston: Little, Brown, 1991, (c)1951

4. "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
New York: Dutton/Plume, 1988

5. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
New York: Viking/Penguin, 1986

6. "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende
New York: Bantam Books, 1986

7. "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker
New York: Pocket Books, 1990

8. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
New York, NY : HarperCollins Publishers, 1999

9. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
New York: Harper, 1998, (c)1932

10. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
New York: Bantam, 1998

11. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain
New York: Bantam Books, 1986

12. "SlaughterHouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
New York: Dell, 1991, (c) 1969.

I dislike this.

For one thing, it's repetitive: Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are thematically and in writing style very similiar books. Same goes (to a lesser extent) with picking two Morrison titles.

It's claim to be a compendium of 'forbidden' books must be based on some ancient, old use of the term. These are books that were under fire decades and decades ago, and get challenged these days mostly because of their ubiquity across the Nation; attacked not just because of their content but because of their entrenchment in national reading lists. A full 5 (!) of the 12 are in California's High School reading syllabus alone. Most of the others came highly recommended from all of my English Teachers.

This is not to say these aren't valuable books. Most of them are, although I'd rather spend a month with my ass corked up then read Color Purple. But to portray them as 'under attack' is to ignore the collective endorsement of a country-wide educational establishment, plus Oprah, plus Rosie O'Donnell. If Berkeley really wanted to go with books 'under attack,' they'd go with Drug-culture books, like Hunter Thompson, or perhaps with challenging Revolutionary books from the Third World like Arundhati Roy.

Zzzz.

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