Celebrate your  freedom to read during Banned Books Week, September 25 –  October 1

This very month, U.S. libraries of all types and sizes, in cities and towns, will acknowledge Banned Books Week September 25—October 1.  Sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and highlighting the value of open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community—libraries, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types —in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider controversial and unpopular.  First observed in 1982, Banned Books Week reminds Americans not to take the freedom to read for granted.  This year’s Banned Books Week slogan is “Stand Up For Your Right To Read.”

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country.

The top ten most challenged books of 2015 include:

1. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
2. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James
3. I Am Jazz, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings
4. Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, by Susan Kuklin
5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
6. The Holy Bible
7. Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
8. Habibi, by Craig Thompson
9. Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan, by Jeanette Winter
10. Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan

Below is a list of banned and/or challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.  Here are the top the top 15 classics from the list, more can be found here http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics/reasons

Challenged Classics

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• Ulysses, by James Joyce
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison
• 1984, by George Orwell
• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner