Turning the page with American Mensa

Arlington, Texas October 21st, 2013 — Members of American Mensa have ranked the “banned books” they think are must reads.

Justin Stanley, the founder of The Uprise Books Project, a nonprofit dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty through literacy by providing banned books to underprivileged kids, selected his 30 top banned books. Mensa members were asked to rank them in order of importance. Big Brother, a teenage girl and a compassionate lawyer made the list.  Comments about the overall winner included references about the author himself (“Orwell's insight into the malleability of human thought and behavior is a timeless incentive to personal awareness of the consequences of action and inaction”) to it’s impact on society (“1984 is one of those books that has become a cultural cornerstone”).

Members randomly selected chose their top 10 from a list of 30 banned books.  To view the full infographic, visit us.mensa.org/topten. The top 10 list of banned books, as selected by Mensa members:

1. 1984
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. On the Origin of Species
5. Catcher in the Rye
6. Of Mice and Men
7. The Lord of the Flies
8. The Lord of the Rings
9. Slaughterhouse-Five
10. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

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American Mensa is an organization open to anyone who scores in the top 2 percent on an accepted standardized intelligence test. Mensa has more than 50,000 members in the United States and more than 130,000 members globally. For more information about American Mensa, visit americanmensa.org or call (817) 607-0060.