By Sharma Shields
Banned Books Week takes place from October 5th-11th. The American Library Association’s theme for this year is “Censorship Is So 1984—Read for Your Rights.” The theme of course is inspired by George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, which is set in a totalitarian state called Oceania, where freedom of thought and expression is heavily surveilled and suppressed, and where governmental lies and scapegoating destroy lives.
About Orwell’s work, an article in the UK’s The Independent says, “Orwell conjured up the ultimate dictatorship to illustrate how anti-democratic leaders use brazen deceit to prove and magnify their power. The seed was sown when Orwell himself was at the receiving end of Stalinist lies while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The propaganda on both sides was so contemptuous of reality, he later wrote, that he feared ‘the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world…This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.’”
It’s worth noting how lies and suppression go hand in hand, and it’s also worth noting how some of our nation’s most censored writers tend to be those who, like Toni Morrison, are the fiercest truthtellers.
The booklist below represents the most challenged books of the year, books unafraid to address subjects such as childhood prostitution and assault, human trafficking and slavery and war, issues many people wish to ignore, simply because they can’t bear to imagine such horrors despite their global prevalence, despite these harms felling children all around us.
It calls to mind the powerful short story by the late science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
The story features a utopian village—Omelas—whose rich livelihood and happiness depends on the isolation and misery of a single child kept locked alone in a filthy, windowless basement. When the happy citizens of the town reach a certain age, they are required to venture into the basement and see the thwarted child. They are not allowed to touch the child or to utter a single kind word. The citizens are initially horrified, of course, to learn about the child’s endless isolation and torture, but most accept it as an ugly truth, viewing the child’s misery as a necessary evil. These citizens might now and again mourn the child, but ultimately they are grateful to them for ingesting the sum total of their civilization’s pain so that thousands can thrive.
And yet there are those who cannot get over what they see, and who choose to leave the utopia for what they hope can be a world where a child isn’t burdened unjustly with suffering.
The story is deeply metaphorical and open to enormous interpretation, as all great stories are, but it asks the reader a question: If you, as a citizen of Omelas, visited the child in the basement, what would you do next?
The banned books below are asking the same sorts of questions of us: Are we willing to view the truth? Will it move us to act? Books that raise these questions sharpen our awareness, expand our empathy, and help those who are harmed in similar ways feel seen, uplifted, fought for, and this helps with collective healing.
We can grow uncomfortable with stories that challenge us and we can succumb to censorship, or we can allow these truthful stories to make us better humans, to show us what we want to accept and what we want to refuse.
For me, the answer is obvious: The more stories told and shared—especially the ‘difficult’ stories—the safer our world becomes. It means less people, less children, alone in the dark.
Here are the ten most-banned books of the year according to the ALA:
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 39
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. (Non-Fiction, Young Adult)
Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 38
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears… (Non-Fiction, Young Adult)
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 35
Challenged for: depiction of sexual assault, depiction of incest, claimed to be sexually explicit, EDI content
Toni Morrison: Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison’s haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town’s prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: “Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her. (Fiction, Adult)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 35
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, LGBTQIA+ content, depiction of sexual assault, depiction of drug use, profanity
A coming of age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Tricks by Ellen Hopkins – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 33
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit
Tricks is a young adult verse novel by Ellen Hopkins, released in August 2009. It tells the converging narratives of five troubled teenage protagonists. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Looking for Alaska by John Green – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 30
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit
Sixteen-year-old Miles’ first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks but is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 30
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, profanity
Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel. Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia — cue extreme adolescent awkwardness — but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed…. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Crank by Ellen Hopkins – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 28
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, depiction of drug use
Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter, gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, Kristina disappears, and Bree takes her place. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina. Through a boy, Bree meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul – her life. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Sold by Patricia McCormick – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 28
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, depiction of sexual assault
Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her poor mountain home in Nepal thinking that she is to work in the city as a maid only to find that she has been sold into the sex slave trade in India and that there is no hope of escape. (Fiction, Young Adult)
Flamer by Mike Curato – Check it Out Here
Number of challenges: 27
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit
“It’s the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone’s going through changes–but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can’t stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.” (Fiction, Young Adult)
