Nickie Muir: Books I've thrown against the wall

Banning Into the River is just going to make kids want to read it.

I like a bit of book-banning. Makes me feel we live in exciting times - like people think that books are important and still hold some influence over young impressionable minds.

One of my favourite banned books is The Lorax. That Dr Seuss was such a rad. Apparently California - the state of free enterprise felt that the book deeply undermined the position of loggers in the state and taught children that logging was potentially dangerous to the environment.

Of course I always thought that Dr Seuss was a bit odd. There was definitely something deeply subversive going on there. Green eggs and ham?

It had to take the death of its author to take it off the banned books list in China - apparently it put early Marxism in a bad light and surely we shouldn't be exposing our kids to anything political too young. It just makes them inquiring and likely to stand up to senseless authority and who wants that in a kid? There's only two books I've ever actually thrown against a wall in utter disgust.

One was recently when I was staying over at a friend's place and found a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey by the bedside table in the guest room. By page three I was screaming at the heroine to flee and wanting to tell every young woman from the Cape to the Bluff that this play more often ends up in the morgue rather than in seventh heaven and is best avoided.

That wasn't why I threw it though - that was because I was deeply jealous that I hadn't made millions out of a book that was so appallingly written. The other was a little known Aussie novel, Coonardo.

It stated on the back that "so often Aboriginal women have been portrayed as animal-like and that this was an attempt to write their voices". The book then had every Aboriginal woman "trot", "bray" and "lollop" through the pages.

In blind rage (I had little social life at the time), I went through and circled every offending verb in the entire novel in an act of defacement that was exceptionally nerdy.

Even for me. Some of the best books ever have been banned - Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye come to mind. The whole point of books is to liberate and educate, to empathise and undermine - in short to allow our minds to wander places we can't go, to see things we might not otherwise see given the constraints of our everyday lives.

Those books have become classics - not because they're subversive but because they're so damn good. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is utterly brilliant and I've lost track of the kids who have been turned on to reading by bouncing through its raucous pages but it too has been banned in some states in America. I haven't heard the same of Ted Dawe's Into the River, but if you wanted a book to get read by a bunch of teenagers - the best thing you can ever do is ban it.