Thing To Read Today: a book on the Index.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum is a list of books formerly banned by the Roman Catholic church (in 1966 Cardinal Ottaviani, swamped with potentially harmful new books, threw up his hands and gave up trying to keep track of all them all). 

It was quite common for all of a writer's books that were at all to do with morals or religion to be put on the Index, but between 1929 and 1966 the ban was extended (possibly unintentionally) to the complete works of some authors, whatever the subject. 

Everything by Zola and Sartre was forbidden, for instance.

Then there were, at various times, bans for Jean de la Fontaine's children's tales, Montaigne's Essays, Richardson's Pamela, Voltaire's Candide, the love novels of Balzac and both Alexanders Dumas, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Charles Darwin's works were never banned, but his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's book, Zoonomia, was.

Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was banned until 1959, which is particularly strange as the Index was run by Catholics who weren't allowed to read the book. 

As this was the case, how on earth could anyone make the judgement to get the Les Misérables ban lifted?

Thing To Read Today: a book on the Index. Index Librorum Prohibitorum is Latin for list of forbidden books. Index means pointer in Latin, from indicāre, to disclose.

I've read quite a lot of them, and I'd probably have enjoyed them even more if I'd known they'd been forbidden.