By JT Santana | jtwb768

That basic arrangement has become increasingly contested. During the 2025–2026 school year, PEN America documented 11,982 instances of book bans in public schools, involving 7,370 unique titles across 114 school districts. PEN America says that is the highest number it has recorded during a single school year since it began tracking school book bans in 2021 (PEN America, 2026). (PEN America)

The American Library Association uses a different methodology, so its figures should not be treated as interchangeable with PEN America’s. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom recorded 4,235 unique titles challenged during 2025, the second-highest figure in its records. Of those titles, 1,671 represented the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color. The ALA reported something else that deserves far more attention: 92% of book challenges in 2025 originated with pressure groups, government officials, and other decision-makers. Fewer than 3% came from individual parents (American Library Association [ALA], 2026a). (American Library Association)

That last statistic tears a rather large hole in the familiar claim that modern book-removal campaigns are simply parents making choices for their children. Parents already have that choice. A parent can tell a child not to read Gender Queer. A parent can decide that The Bluest Eye is too mature for a particular teenager. A family can decline The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hate U Give, Maus, or virtually anything else.

The dispute begins when somebody tries to make that decision for everybody else’s family.

A Challenge Is Not the Same Thing as a Ban

Language counts here. The ALA defines a challenge as an attempt to remove or restrict access to material after an objection. A ban occurs when the material is actually removed. A challenged book may remain available after librarians, educators, administrators, or boards review the complaint, so describing every challenged book as banned would be inaccurate (ALA, 2026b). (American Library Association)

Access restrictions can operate somewhere between those categories. A book might remain technically available but be moved to another section, placed behind a desk, limited by grade level, or made available solely with parental permission. Those distinctions have practical significance for readers. A book that technically exists in a collection can become considerably harder for a student to encounter.

Banned Books Week began in 1982 after a surge in challenges involving libraries, schools, and bookstores. The observance has never required readers to agree with every book placed on a library shelf. Intellectual freedom would mean very little if it protected solely books that everyone found agreeable. The principle becomes meaningful when a book irritates us, unsettles us, challenges our assumptions, presents an identity unfamiliar to us, or contains ideas we reject (American Association of School Librarians, 2026). (American Library Association)

Libraries are built around that distinction. A library collection is not a declaration that every librarian, taxpayer, teacher, board member, parent, or patron endorses every sentence contained inside every book. It is a collection of ideas, histories, stories, arguments, memoirs, scholarship, fiction, testimony, entertainment, and human experience.

You do not have to approve of a book.

You do not have to read it.

You do not get to automatically decide that nobody else may read it.

Those are three very different propositions.

Seven Books Worth Checking Out

If Banned Books Week is going to mean something beyond social-media graphics and slogans, one response is wonderfully uncomplicated: read one of the books people keep fighting over.

Do not rely on a viral screenshot. Do not rely on a speaker at a school-board meeting who may have selected three sentences from a 300-page novel. Do not rely on somebody telling you what a book supposedly says. Go to your local library, check it out, read it in context, and decide for yourself.

Here are seven from a much longer list.

1984 by George Orwell

There may be no more delicious irony in American literary censorship than attempts to suppress 1984.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel examines political repression, surveillance, propaganda, manipulated language, historical revision, and governmental control over truth. It has become such a recognizable warning about censorship that the ALA itself has used the phrase “Censorship Is So 1984” in freedom-to-read campaigns.

Yet the novel has faced challenges of its own. The ALA records a 1981 challenge in Jackson County, Florida, where objections described the book as “pro-communist” and objected to sexual material (ALA, n.d.). (American Library Association)

That history reveals one of the recurring absurdities surrounding censorship. A novel warning readers about systems that control information becomes information someone wants controlled.

1984 is uncomfortable by design. Winston Smith lives in a society where independent thought itself becomes dangerous. Language is manipulated to narrow the range of ideas citizens can express. History is changed whenever political needs demand a different past.

You do not need to interpret every contemporary controversy through Orwell. You should probably be suspicious of anyone who does. Yet the larger question at the center of the book remains useful: What happens when institutions gain authority to determine which ideas citizens may encounter?

That question has not expired.

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

Then there is the children’s book about penguins that managed to terrify grown adults.

And Tango Makes Three tells the story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo who formed a pair and raised a chick named Tango. The story is based on actual penguins.

That premise has generated years of challenges.

The ALA reported the book as America’s most frequently challenged title in 2010. Objections included homosexuality, religious viewpoints, and claims that the book was inappropriate for its intended age group. It appeared repeatedly on challenged-book lists in later years, with LGBTQIA+ content continuing to drive objections (ALA, 2011). (American Library Association)

Think about what children actually encounter here. Two penguins care for an egg. The egg hatches. The penguins raise Tango.

That is it.

Yet And Tango Makes Three illustrates a recurring pattern in censorship disputes involving LGBTQ+ material: the mere existence of a same-sex relationship is sometimes classified as inherently sexual or age-inappropriate in circumstances where an equivalent heterosexual relationship would attract little notice.

A children’s book depicting a mother and father does not usually trigger accusations that a library is teaching children about heterosexual sex. Two male penguins apparently require an emergency school-board meeting.

Readers can judge the logic for themselves.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Few books represent the modern censorship fight more clearly than Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer.

The memoir recounts Kobabe’s experiences with gender identity, sexuality, family, relationships, and coming to identify as nonbinary and asexual. Its graphic-novel format includes illustrations involving bodies and sexuality, and critics have repeatedly cited those images when seeking removal or restrictions.

The ALA ranked Gender Queer among the most challenged books in the United States for several consecutive years. It was the second-most challenged title of 2024 and third-most challenged in 2025. The ALA reports objections centered on LGBTQIA+ content and claims that material in the memoir is sexually explicit (ALA, 2026c). (American Library Association)

People can have legitimate debates over age placement. A discussion concerning whether one book belongs in an elementary-school collection, middle-school collection, high-school collection, or adult collection is different from declaring that its ideas have no legitimate place in a library.

That distinction often disappears.

Gender Queer has become a symbol onto which a much broader argument over transgender and nonbinary people has been projected. At times, discussion of the actual book becomes almost secondary. The title functions as shorthand for political battles over gender, schools, parents, libraries, and LGBTQ+ visibility.

That is an excellent reason to read the actual memoir before declaring what it represents.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a society in which women’s bodies, sexuality, reproductive lives, literacy, movement, and social roles are controlled by an authoritarian theocracy.

It is not subtle.

It is not supposed to be.

The novel has faced challenges over profanity, sexual material, and what critics have described as vulgarity. It appeared on the ALA’s most-challenged list in 2019, and PEN America identifies it among books subjected to contemporary school bans (ALA, 2020; PEN America, 2026). (American Library Association)

Atwood’s fictional Republic of Gilead strips women of legal independence and assigns them social functions according to fertility, class, and status. Sexual violence sits at the center of the regime. Religious text is selectively deployed as political justification for state control.

Removing uncomfortable material from The Handmaid’s Tale would gut the novel. The brutality is part of what Atwood is asking readers to confront. The story cannot seriously examine coerced reproduction through a sanitized account that pretends coercion is polite.

Readers can reject Atwood’s politics. They can dispute parallels people draw between Gilead and contemporary America. They can find some comparisons overstated or lazy.

What should concern us is the idea that disagreement can be resolved by preventing readers from encountering the book at all.

Maus I by Art Spiegelman

Maus may present one of the clearest examples of the danger in evaluating serious literature through isolated objections.

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic work recounts his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, portraying Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats. It deals with Auschwitz, persecution, murder, survival, family trauma, suicide, guilt, memory, and the relationship between Spiegelman and his father.

In 2022, the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee removed Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum. The board cited profanity, nudity, violence, suicide, and concerns that the material was too adult for the students involved. The nudity included an image representing Spiegelman’s mother after her suicide (Lock, 2022). (The Guardian)

Nobody needs to pretend that Maus is pleasant.

It is a Holocaust narrative.

If students study genocide, they are studying human beings humiliating, starving, torturing, deporting, and murdering other human beings on an industrial scale. Sanitizing that history until nothing disturbing remains risks teaching a version of the Holocaust stripped of the very horror students need to grasp.

There is room for legitimate educational discussion about grade level, instructional context, support from teachers, and how traumatic historical material should be presented. Those questions are pedagogical. They are very different from assuming students are protected when disturbing history disappears from their reading.

The Holocaust is supposed to disturb us.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison does not write comfortable books about comfortable subjects.

The Bluest Eye examines racism, colorism, beauty standards, poverty, childhood, sexual violence, incest, and the psychological devastation inflicted on a Black girl who comes to believe that possessing blue eyes would make her beautiful and worthy.

The book has spent decades facing challenges. In recent years, it has remained one of America’s most frequently targeted titles. The ALA ranked it among the most challenged books of both 2023 and 2024, citing objections involving depictions of sexual assault, incest, sexual content, and equity and inclusion themes (ALA, 2026c). (American Library Association)

None of those subjects is easy. Sexual abuse of a child should be difficult to read.

But depiction is not endorsement.

That distinction is one censorship debates repeatedly flatten. A novel portraying rape is not necessarily promoting rape. A memoir recounting sexual experiences is not automatically pornography. A story portraying racism does not create racism by acknowledging it.

Morrison asks readers to look at what happens when a child receives message after message telling her that beauty, innocence, desirability, and value belong to people who do not look like her. The abuse she experiences sits inside a larger social structure of humiliation and self-hatred.

One may decide that the novel requires mature readers and thoughtful instruction. Erasing it does nothing for children experiencing abuse, racism, poverty, or shame in real life.

Silence does not make those experiences disappear.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give follows Starr Carter, a Black teenager who witnesses a police officer fatally shoot her unarmed childhood friend Khalil.

The novel explores grief, policing, racism, protest, identity, friendship, family, activism, and the enormous pressures placed on a teenager after a traumatic event becomes politically explosive. It has repeatedly faced objections involving profanity, violence, drug references, sexual references, and claims that it presents an anti-police viewpoint.

The ALA listed The Hate U Give among its most challenged books in 2018, 2020, and 2021. In 2021, objections included violence, profanity, alleged anti-police messaging, and claims of political indoctrination (ALA, 2026c). (American Library Association)

A novel about a police shooting will inevitably say something about policing. That does not compel every reader to agree with it.

Books are allowed to have viewpoints.

Students are allowed to encounter viewpoints.

Readers are allowed to challenge those viewpoints with evidence, experience, argument, criticism, and other books.

That process is called reading.

Removing the book skips the entire intellectual exercise.

Parents Have Rights. So Do Other Parents.

“Parents’ rights” has become one of the most effective phrases in contemporary education politics, and there is a legitimate principle inside it. Parents have enormous responsibility for guiding their children. They should know what their children are reading, ask questions about curriculum, communicate with teachers, review school policies, and make decisions based on their child’s maturity.

The problem begins when parental authority over one’s own child becomes authority over everybody else’s child.

If I decide that my teenager should not read The Handmaid’s Tale, that is a family decision. If I demand that the school remove The Handmaid’s Tale so your teenager cannot read it either, I have crossed from parenting into censorship.

The same principle works regardless of ideology.

A progressive parent uncomfortable with a conservative book does not acquire greater moral authority to remove it for everyone. A Christian parent should not be able to strip atheist books from an entire library. An atheist parent should not be able to remove the Bible. A gay parent does not get to eliminate books presenting traditional religious teachings on sexuality. A conservative parent does not get to erase books containing gay families.

A pluralistic society becomes impossible when access to ideas depends on whichever faction can pack the most people into a board meeting.

Libraries give families another option: choice.

One reader checks out The Hate U Give. Another chooses 1984. Someone else takes home a romance novel, Bible commentary, presidential biography, graphic memoir, cookbook, science-fiction novel, or book about penguins.

Nobody is required to check out all of them.

That is the point.

The Pattern in the Books We Target

Look again at the titles being challenged.

Race.

Racism.

Gender.

Sexual orientation.

Sexual assault.

Reproductive control.

Police violence.

Historical atrocity.

Political repression.

These are not random subjects.

According to the ALA, 1,671 of the unique books challenged during 2025 represented LGBTQIA+ people and people of color. The organization’s data shows that claims involving LGBTQIA+ themes, race, racism, equity, social justice, and alleged sexual explicitness continue to drive a large share of censorship activity (ALA, 2026a). (American Library Association)

PEN America’s newest figures point in the same direction from a different dataset. During the 2025–2026 school year, it recorded 11,982 school book-ban instances, 7,370 unique titles, and works from more than 4,000 authors, illustrators, and translators. More than half of the banned titles were intended for young-adult audiences (PEN America, 2026). (PEN America)

There is another detail worth sitting with. The ALA reports that fewer than 3% of 2025 challenges came from individual parents, with 92% originating from pressure groups, government officials, and other decision-makers.

That does not mean every objection is illegitimate. It does mean the public deserves to stop hearing this issue described as though thousands of unrelated parents independently wandered into libraries, discovered books they disliked, and spontaneously created a national movement.

The evidence says something far more organized is occurring.

Read It Before You Demand Its Removal

I do not believe every book belongs in every library collection.

Libraries make acquisition decisions every day. School libraries consider age, reading level, curriculum, space, community needs, professional reviews, educational value, demand, cost, and collection balance. Books can be reconsidered through established review procedures.

That is normal collection management.

The problem is ideological removal: deciding that an idea, identity, history, or experience is too dangerous for other people to encounter.

There is a simple test that would improve a large percentage of these fights.

Read the damn book.

Read all of it.

Then tell us what you object to.

Tell us the page.

Tell us the context.

Tell us the intended age group.

Tell us why restricting every other reader is the appropriate response.

And be prepared for someone who read the same book to disagree with you.

That is how a society committed to intellectual freedom functions. We argue. We criticize. We review. We recommend. We condemn. We defend. We write better books. We read opposing books. We make choices for ourselves and our own families.

We do not need a government official, political organization, activist group, school-board faction, or stranger deciding which ideas adults and families are permitted to encounter.

Banned Books Week ends tonight.

The freedom to read does not.

So here is my suggestion: visit your local library. Pick one book from the list. Check it out.

Try 1984. Read The Hate U Give. Sit with The Bluest Eye. Experience Maus rather than hearing someone describe it. Read Gender Queer before accepting somebody else’s characterization of it. See what supposedly makes two male penguins raising Tango so threatening. Read The Handmaid’s Tale and decide for yourself what Margaret Atwood has to say.

You may love the book.

You may hate it.

You may close it halfway through and wonder why anyone made such a fuss.

That freedom belongs to you.

And it belongs to the reader standing next to you at the library.

References

American Association of School Librarians. (2026). Banned Books Week. American Library Association. (American Library Association)

American Library Association. (2011, April 11). “And Tango Makes Three” waddles its way back to the number one slot as America’s most frequently challenged book. (American Library Association)

American Library Association. (2026a). Censorship by the numbers: Banned books data. (American Library Association)

American Library Association. (2026b). About banned and challenged books. (American Library Association)

American Library Association. (2026c). Most challenged books. (American Library Association)

American Library Association. (n.d.). Frequently challenged books: 1984. (American Library Association)

Lock, S. (2022, January 26). Tennessee school board bans Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust novel, Maus. The Guardian. (The Guardian)

PEN America. (2026, October 5). A spotlight on school book bans: National findings for the 2025–2026 school year. (PEN America)

PEN America. (2026). Banned Books Week 2026. (PEN America)