It's Banned Books Week! Here's why that matters...

It’s time for my favorite holiday of the year—no, not Halloween, and not Taiwan’s Moon Festival either (although don’t get me wrong, I love a good BBQ during Spooky Season). No, it’s Banned Books Week, and this year’s celebration is more important than it’s ever been before.

What is Banned Books Week?

Banned Books Week is, at its heart, a celebration of every person’s fundamental right to read and access ideas freely. It began in the United States in 1982, in response to a surge in book challenges across the country.

By drawing national (and now, international) attention to growing numbers of censorship attempts, it’s a way to both highlight people’s right to read and fight the censorship that threatens it. The event has grown to include librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers from all over the world—all united in support of the freedom to read.

Now, more than forty years later, the U.S. is experiencing another wave of book bans and challenges. In greater numbers than ever before, there has been a concerted effort to remove books from school and library shelves, making them inaccessible to potential readers. 

But if reading is a right, how are books still being banned?

An excellent question! In the United States, the freedom to read and access information is protected under the First Amendment. (Different countries will have their own laws regarding censorship—I’d encourage you to look yours up if you aren’t sure!) 

So, since the government cannot outright ban a book from being published or distributed, it’s easy to assume that there’s no need to worry about censorship via book banning. And yet, books are being taken from shelves every day. How?

Well, in a myriad of alarming ways, most of which first involve challenging a book.

A book challenge is an attempt to restrict access or remove a book from a library, school, or classroom so that it is difficult or impossible for patrons to read.

Challenges can be verbal or written, informal or official. They can happen in a school or a library or a bookstore or a neighborhood meeting or an email. Here is how they work:

A person (or, increasingly often, a group of people) can request that a book be removed from its current place for any reason whatsoever. They may claim that the book contains content that is inappropriate for certain audiences (often children, but sometimes just everyone), or is otherwise undesirable. They will submit their request to remove the book to whoever is in charge—the librarian, bookseller, or school faculty member. And voila: the book has been challenged.

A book ban, then, is a book challenge that has succeeded—that is, it has resulted in the removal of the book from its shelf. 

If the person who reviewed the request/challenge agrees with it (or if they’re just tired of hearing about it, or if they’ve been directed to do so by their superior) they may remove the challenged book from its shelf. And in doing so, the book has officially been censored; it is no longer readily available to be read by members of the community.

And an outright removal isn’t the only means of censorship, either: in some cases, books may be moved to a “restricted” area, out of sight or out of reach or behind a locked door. Some might argue semantics here (“The book wasn’t technically removed from the library”) but, after all, the point is to be able to access and read the materials—not simply to know that they are in the building somewhere, but unreachable.

Books are challenged all the time, and the actual number of book challenges is estimated to be far greater than even the 4,000+ titles recorded by the American Library Association. Book challenges don’t need to be reported, and most of the time, they aren’t. We have no way of knowing how many books are challenged each year; only that the number of reported instances has grown at an alarming rate.

What we do know, however, is that this effort is not being led by concerned parents or individual library patrons. Instead, pressure groups and government entities (including elected officials) were responsible for initiating 72% of all reported censorship demands last year.

And (surprise, surprise) these groups’ efforts tend to be politically motivated. Reasons for book challenges frequently include “obscenity” and “sexually explicit” content, often when the content is nothing more than the existence of LGBTQIA+ characters. Other books are challenged for being “anti-family,” for profanity, or for simply having political or religious viewpoints.

Here's the scary part... Censorship is sneaky.

Right now, there are coordinated efforts to challenge as many books as possible, exhausting and overwhelming school and library systems that are already stretched thin. It’s brilliant, really, and scarily effective; the sheer number of challenges, even if most of them will be denied, are taking up precious time and resources. And the really chilling effect is this: people who would ordinarily fight back against censorship are instead starting to self-censor, and to comply in advance.

After all… Could we really blame the librarian who chooses to just not order the newest LGBTQ+ friendly book, when she knows that she’ll have to deal with the slew of challenges that follow? Can we fault the teachers in censorship-heavy states who are opting to remove all the books from their classroom shelves, because they don’t have the time or energy to catalogue every sentence that might be an issue with a parent or administrator?

It’s easy to see why, when all of these decisions are happening behind the scenes and in localized areas, a successful book ban can seem like it’s not that big of a deal. But it really, really is—every time.

“But they can still buy it at a bookstore.” Some people can, sure. Others rely on their schools and libraries as the only affordable way to access books. The right to read and access information is for everyone, not just those with expendable cash.

“But they can find it online.” Can they, though? And more to the point... would they? If it’s not on a shelf, if no one in their community is reading it or talking about it, how will they know that it exists? If a book has been censored before it reaches a potential reader, how is that reader to know that a book has been taken from them at all?

Moreover, the readers who are most often targeted—and therefore most affected—are children. 

Children are people with rights, just like everyone else. But they are young, and they depend entirely on adults. They are a vulnerable group without their own money, without their own means of purchasing books or traveling to other locations where books might be found. 

They are the ones who stand the most to gain by reading as much and as often as they possibly can, and who have the most to lose when it comes to censorship. You take away a child’s freedom to read, and you take away their ability to form their own ideas and opinions, to see the world through a different lens and to find stories that they can connect with.

It’s our job, it has to be our job, to seek out the books that are most likely to be targeted and removed, and to read them, and to share them, and to make sure that they don’t disappear from our communities.

Which is exactly why Banned Books Week is so, so important. While political groups are mobilizing to restrict our freedom to read, the rest of us have got to fight it. 

Here’s how:

1. Read banned books. Find out which titles are frequently banned or challenged in your area and seek them out. If you can check them out from your local library, do so! Libraries exist to serve their patrons, so if a book is checked out often, it’s less likely to be removed if challenged.

   
   

2. Recommend your favorites. Good books and good ideas are worth sharing. Help important stories survive by telling other readers about them. Better yet: buy everyone you know a banned book for the holidays!

   
   

3. Talk about censorship. One of the main reasons that book banning efforts have been so successful in recent years is that plenty of people aren’t aware that they are happening in the first place. If you’re an educator or a parent, you can talk about book banning with your students/kids, and help them understand what censorship is and why they should care about it.

   
   

4. Report any known instances of book challenges to the ALA (if you live in the U.S.). If you work in a school or library, or if you have another means of knowing when books have been challenged in your community, sharing that information with the ALA helps them to keep track of censorship efforts—and fight back against them.

   
   

5. Support your local library. Librarians are on the front lines of the fight against censorship, and they could use all the help we can give them. Opening a library card (and using it) brings resources to your library—the more patrons they have, the more funding they get. And lots of libraries have more than just books! Makerspaces, online learning or video platforms, events and tools and apps and all kinds of things might be available and waiting for you at your local library… all completely free, because your taxes have already paid for ‘em!

   
   

6. Get involved with Banned Books Week, PEN America, the American Library Association, or any other organization working against censorship. You can donate, participate in events, or just help spread the word about their cause.

In the spirit of the first two items on this list, I’ll be sharing another post soon with a list of all of my favorite books from ALA's banned books list—some of which I’m rereading this week to celebrate Banned Books Week. I hope you’ll send some recommendations my way, too, because I’m always looking for new banned books to add to my collection. 

Happy Banned Books Week, and happy reading!

Love,

Rosie the Scatterbrain

P.S. For the whole month of October, I’m donating 50% of my earnings from any purchase of reading-related merchandise to the fight against censorship. You can find the whole collection of bookish stuff on my shop page!