What the ALA's list of the 150 most banned books of 35 years shows
For Banned Books Week, the American Library Association published a list of the 150 most challenged books documented between 1990 and 2025, and Literary Hub's Brittany Allen went through it by category. I found her breakdown more revealing than the headline numbers.
Some context first: the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 4,235 challenged titles last year, the second-highest total on record. Of the 150 on the list, adult classics account for 20, including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, alongside Salinger, Twain, Wright, Morrison and Huxley. Allen was surprised to see newer books like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants there too.
The biggest group by far is young adult fiction, with 81 titles. Allen notes that books touching on gender and sexual content were challenged more often than those about gun violence, racial violence, mental illness, drugs or the immigrant experience. Ellen Hopkins has 14 books on the list and Lauren Myracle has six. There are 11 children's and middle-grade titles, mostly about gender identity or queer families, such as Julián Is a Mermaid and And Tango Makes Three, plus eight graphic novels, eight memoirs, and 10 romantasy books, nine of them by Sarah J. Maas.
A few oddities show up as well: five puberty guides, one anti-racist handbook, and a hard-to-categorize group that includes two Rupi Kaur collections and a ghost-story compilation, which Allen suggests may be a leftover of the Satanic Panic.
Her conclusion is that book banners show little logic in their choices, and she encourages readers to pick up the titles, which are listed at ala150.org. That strikes me as a good, practical way to mark the week: read one.
Source: Literary Hub
Some context first: the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 4,235 challenged titles last year, the second-highest total on record. Of the 150 on the list, adult classics account for 20, including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, alongside Salinger, Twain, Wright, Morrison and Huxley. Allen was surprised to see newer books like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants there too.
The biggest group by far is young adult fiction, with 81 titles. Allen notes that books touching on gender and sexual content were challenged more often than those about gun violence, racial violence, mental illness, drugs or the immigrant experience. Ellen Hopkins has 14 books on the list and Lauren Myracle has six. There are 11 children's and middle-grade titles, mostly about gender identity or queer families, such as Julián Is a Mermaid and And Tango Makes Three, plus eight graphic novels, eight memoirs, and 10 romantasy books, nine of them by Sarah J. Maas.
A few oddities show up as well: five puberty guides, one anti-racist handbook, and a hard-to-categorize group that includes two Rupi Kaur collections and a ghost-story compilation, which Allen suggests may be a leftover of the Satanic Panic.
Her conclusion is that book banners show little logic in their choices, and she encourages readers to pick up the titles, which are listed at ala150.org. That strikes me as a good, practical way to mark the week: read one.
Source: Literary Hub
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