The discussion of the books I'll reluctantly describe as "dirty" may have veered definitively off-topic. But it did set me thinking about which books, if any, I'd ban from school libraries - in the unlikely circumstance of me being in a position to ban anything.
There are, of course, plenty of books that I don't much like. Plenty more that I detest. The appalling conservatism of Jane Austen makes me retch (anyone who doubts it - I mean the conservatism, not the retching - should read Marilyn Butler's stunning Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, which brilliantly nails Austen as one of the bad guys of Eng Lit, assuming you come at it from a Guardian-type liberal angle).
Meanwhile, the Nietzschean maelstrom that is the moral world of Horrid Henry disturbs me profoundly. And I'm sure I'm going to suffer for this, but I also find Philip Pullman's heavy-haunched allegories woeful.
The tragedy with Pullman is that he is, without doubt, our finest living children's writer - all of his non-Dark Materials books (I'm thinking of works like the simply perfect I Was A Rat) are entrancing, funny, playful and moving. But when he turns his big guns on the tired old Catholic church, he joins a tradition of bigoted English gothic caricature, going back to "Monk" Lewis and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. It's like watching a big game hunter going after the last White Rhino. Not brave and not clever.
Global capitalism, corrupt dictatorships, crime syndicates, Tesco, pot noodles ... almost anything seems a more fitting target than the church, forlornly stammering its message that we should love each other, turn the other cheek, hold off coveting our neighbour's ass, etc etc, to a world too busy playing Grand Theft Auto to listen.
But ban them? Of course not. Our culture needs books and ideas to breathe and no one has the right to put their foot on the air tube.
Except ... Except, there are some writers I'd be reluctant to let teenagers read. Nietzsche can be blamed for a whole lot more than Horrid Henry. All existing morality, Nietzsche claims, is slave morality. By that he means it's the way that the weak protect themselves from the strong. For Nietzsche, that entails a terrible crime against the proper order of things, in which the weak are the corn, and the strong - his Supermen - the scythe. Eighty per cent of Nazi ideology comes straight from Nietzsche. His defenders hark on about the fact that he wasn't an antisemite, or a particular fan of narrow German nationalism, which are to his credit, but they can't counterbalance the misogyny, the love of violence, the contempt for compassion, the hatred of toiling humanity, the unnecessarily large moustache.
So, if you spot an intense-looking teenage boy brooding over a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil (for obvious reasons he's unlikely to have been tempted by The Gay Science), tear it from his hand and throw it out of the window. And out should go De Sade, for similar reasons. His philosophy is more corrupting and dangerous (and interesting) than the penetrative permutations he works out with such mathematical rigour. The Enlightenment, he tells us, taught that nature is good. Human beings are part of nature and therefore good. (Fine so far.) My natural inclinations, he says, are to torture and debauch young boys and girls. That's natural, therefore it is good.
OK, so not many teenagers are going to be reading Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, but there's a whole world of books that I'd ban straight away if I got the chance: pink books. Yes, down there with Nietzsche and De Sade I'd place those terrible teeny-chick lit "novels", the ones about snogging and boyfriends and make-up and nothing else. The novel is supposed (says who? says me) to exalt the soul, to show humanity what, in its greatest moments, it might achieve; and yet also to reveal our vulnerability and our helplessness.
The leathery-skinned hacks who churn out the Pink books present a vision of young people as self-obsessed, shallow, blind automata, swilling about in a moronic inferno. Reading these books will leave your soul as shrivelled as one of those pistachios you sometimes find, blackened, in the bottom of the bag. Teenage girls, read the Brontës, read Elizabeth Gaskell, read George Eliot, read anything else - even Jane Austen - but keep the pink off your shelves.
