Welcome to the ILL

Hello and welcome to the homepage of the Index Librorum Liberorum. For a year, working with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) officially catalogued and promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church under the leadership of Pope Paul IV in 1559, participants are encouraged to select books or the oeuvre of authors to read, mull over and share with like-minded individuals at this site. The only requirement is that each participant chooses authors from at least three different countries. The Beacon for Freedom of Expression has a database that allows sorting by country. (Awkward database but the best I could find so far.)

This index is notable because of the many illustrious fiction writers, poets and philosophers that have been honoured with a place on the list. Here's a very small sample:

Albert Moravia
George Sand
Laurence Stern
Victor Hugo
Francis Bacon
Spinoza
Blaise Pascal
Daniel Defoe
John Milton
Radclyffe Hall

I was so impressed that I thought to myself, My, wouldn't this make a good challenge? A wide range of authors including obscure religious works, philosophy, fiction, poetry...the possibilities and possible combination of choices seem endless.

Any reviews or relevant challenge related posts should be submitted here and, of course, may be cross-posted at your personal blog, if you have one. For organizational purposes please take care to add "fiction", "poetry", "philosophy", "non-fiction", "general" and similar label/tags to your post to make browsing easier. The challenge starts on September 1st 2007 and ends on August 31st 2008. The long period allows us to give, to a small extent, the attention such a list deserves.

Because of the incomplete nature of the list readers are allowed to choose any works by the authors on the list rather than being limited to specific works. You may sign up to the challenge at any time and choose as many or as few books as you like: the only requirement is that at least three countries are represented.

You can sign up by submitting a comment with your contact information and URL (if this info is not in your blogger profile) to any of the posts. I'll contact you with a blogger invitation so that you can post and I'll add your name to the sidebar. If you wish to be a silent participant, that's ok too!

Suggestions, tips and feedback are welcome. I hope that we all have a lot of fun with this. Many thanks to the dwarvish but learnéd Sylvia for providing the corrected title change.