The Most Challenged and Banned Books
Books have an inherent ability to expand a reader’s horizons, touch their hearts, and change their minds. Reading a wide range of perspectives not only makes us better, it helps us exercise empathy and see the world in new eyes. Books are powerful. But with the growing number of books being challenged and banned, it is up to all of us to make sure these stories continue to be read and shared. Learn more about the rapid rise of book challenges and bans through data and reports from the American Library Association. Find more resources for parents, educators, and more here.
-
1
Add to BookshelfGender Queer
by Maia Kobabe
Read by Maia Kobabe, Trini Alvarado, Stephen Graybill, Phoebe Kobabe, Jeremy Carlisle Parker and Full Cast
The groundbreaking, bestselling graphic novel is now available on audio. 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. Then e created Gender Queer. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity — what it means and how to think about it — for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Add to BookshelfBuy from Other Retailers:
-
2
Add to Bookshelf
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove — and 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others — prays for her eyes to turn blue: So that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
3
Add to Bookshelf
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Revised Edition)
by Jesse Andrews
Read by Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Keith Szarabajka, Hillary Huber, Kirby Heyborne, Abigail Revasch and Adenrele Ojo
Up until senior year, Greg has maintained total social invisibility. He only has one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies. Greg would be the first one to tell you his movies are terrible, but he and Earl don’t make them for other people. Until Rachel. Rachel, who has leukemia, befriends Greg and Earl. When Rachel decides to stop treatment, Greg and Earl must abandon invisibility and make a stand. It’s a hilarious, outrageous, and truthful look at death and high school by a prodigiously talented debut author.
Add to BookshelfBuy from Other Retailers:
-
4
Add to Bookshelf
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nick Carraway is an aspiring writer; his cousin, Daisy, is married to the fabulously wealthy Tom Buchanan. Their neighbor, Jay Gatsby, throws extravagant and extraordinary parties in the exclusive and hallowed neighborhood of West Egg. The entanglements between these four characters form the backbone of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work. The classic novel that continues to haunt our understanding of ambition, love, entitlement, and the American Dream.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
5
Add to Bookshelf
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone). Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
6
Add to Bookshelf
A Thousand Splendid Suns Illustrated Edition
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$29.95Buy from Other Retailers:
-
7
Add to Bookshelf
The 1619 Project
created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. This book speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction — and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$25.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
8
Add to Bookshelf
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
9
Add to Bookshelf
When Stars Are Scattered
by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed
Omar and his younger brother, Hassan, have spent most of their lives in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya. Life is hard there: Never enough food, achingly dull, and without access to medical care Omar knows his nonverbal brother needs. So when Omar has the opportunity to go to school, he knows it might be a chance to change their future … but it would also mean leaving his brother, the only family member he has left, every day. Heartbreak, hope, and gentle humor exist together in this graphic novel about a childhood spent waiting, and a young man who is able to create a sense of family and home in the most difficult of settings.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$24.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
10
Add to Bookshelf
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. The Handmaid’s Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times).
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
11
Add to Bookshelf
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
12
Add to Bookshelf
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: To be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
13
Add to Bookshelf
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition)
by James Baldwin
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a 14-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
14
Add to Bookshelf
The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman
A brutally moving work of art — widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written — Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$38.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
15
Add to Bookshelf
Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo Anaya
Although only six years old, Antonio Marez is perceptive beyond his years. He was brought into the world with the help of Ultima, a curandera, or folk healer, in touch with nature and the spirit world. Revered by some as a wisewoman but rebuked by others as a witch, Ultima has now come back to stay with Tony’s family in New Mexico. As Tony seeks out his destiny — torn between his mother’s farming forebears and his father’s wandering vaquero roots, between Spanish Catholicism and the gods of his indigenous ancestors — Ultima’s loving tutelage will help him navigate questions of life and death, good and evil, and reveal to him the vastness of the heritage that shapes him, in this pioneering work of literature.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$32.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
16
Add to Bookshelf
Heather Has Two Mommies
by Lesléa Newman
Heather’s favorite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two pets — and two mommies. When Heather goes to school for the first time, someone asks her about her daddy, but Heather doesn’t have a daddy. Then something interesting happens. When Heather and her classmates all draw pictures of their families, not one drawing is the same!
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$8.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
17
Add to Bookshelf
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
by Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the feeling took root — that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love. Lily and Kath will need to risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$13.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
18
Add to Bookshelf
It’s Perfectly Normal
by Robie H. Harris
Fully and fearlessly updated, this vital new edition of the acclaimed book on sex, sexuality, bodies, and puberty deserves a spot in every family’s library. Inclusive and accessible, It’s Perfectly Normal provides young people with the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand their bodies, relationships, and identities in order to make responsible decisions and stay healthy.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$24.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
19
Add to Bookshelf
Beyond Magenta
by Susan Kuklin
A groundbreaking work of LGBTQ+ literature takes an honest look at the life, love, and struggles of transgender teens. Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$15.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
20
Add to Bookshelf
SHOUT
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. SHOUT speaks truth to power in a loud, clear voice — and once you hear it, it is impossible to ignore.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$13.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
21
Add to Bookshelf
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
22
Add to Bookshelf
Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes and explores their histories — reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 — and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
23
Add to Bookshelf
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
Told in a series of vignettes — sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous — Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. It makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you’re from.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
24
Add to Bookshelf
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Entranced by the perfection of his recently painted portrait, the youthful Dorian Gray expresses a wish that the figure on the canvas could age and change in his place. When his wish comes true, the portrait becomes his hideous secret as he follows a downward trajectory of decadence and cruelty that leaves its traces only in the portrait’s degraded image. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s unforgettable portrayal of a Faustian bargain and its consequences, is narrated with his characteristic incisive wit and diamond-sharp prose.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$10.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
25
Add to Bookshelf
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
One of the most moving and eloquent accounts of the Holocaust, The Diary of a Young Girl is the record of two years in the life of a remarkable Jewish girl whose triumphant humanity in the face of unfathomable deprivation and fear has made the book one of the most enduring documents of our time.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
26
Add to Bookshelf
A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl
by Tanya Lee Stone
Josie, Nicolette, and Aviva all get mixed up with a senior boy — a cool, slick, sexy boy who can talk them into doing almost anything he wants. In a blur of high school hormones and personal doubt, each girl struggles with how much to give up and what ultimately to keep for herself. How do girls handle themselves? How much can a boy get away with? And in the end, who comes out on top? A bad boy may always be a bad boy. But this bad boy is about to meet three girls who won’t back down.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$13.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
27
Add to Bookshelf
The Complete Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$35.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
28
Add to Bookshelf
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
29
Add to Bookshelf
Draw Me a Star
by Eric Carle
Draw me a star. And the artist drew a star. It was a good star. Draw me a sun, said the star. And the artist drew a sun. And on the artist draws, bringing the world to life picture by beautiful picture until he is spirited across the night sky by a star that shines on all he has made. In Draw Me a Star, Eric Carle celebrates the imagination in all of us with a beguiling story about a young artist who creates a world of light and possibility.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$9.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
30
Add to Bookshelf
1984
by George Orwell
Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever …
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
31
Add to Bookshelf
Ordinary People
by Judith Guest
In Ordinary People, Judith Guest’s remarkable first novel, the Jarrets are a typical American family. Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this memorable, moving novel, Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain, and ultimate healing. Ordinary People is an extraordinary novel about an “ordinary” family divided by pain, yet bound by their struggle to heal.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
32
Add to Bookshelf
The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy Box Set
by A. N. Roquelaure
In 1983, Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, began the first installment of the series that is now considered a forerunner of erotic literature. This boxed set, containing the New York Times bestseller The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release is a testament to Rice’s irresistible talent, charged eroticism, and magical style.
Add to BookshelfBoxed Set
$54.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
33
Add to Bookshelf
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
As provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, Lord of the Flies continues to ignite passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. William Golding’s compelling story about a group of very ordinary boys marooned on a coral island has been labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, and even a vision of the apocalypse. But above all, it has earned its place as one of the indisputable classics of the twentieth century for readers of any age.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
34
Add to Bookshelf
The Chocolate War
by Robert Cormier
One of the most controversial YA novels of all time, The Chocolate War is a modern masterpiece that speaks to fans of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. This chilling portrait of an all-boys prep school casts an unflinching eye on the pitfalls of conformity and corruption in our most elite cultural institutions.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$11.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
35
Add to Bookshelf
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
36
Add to Bookshelf
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
by Mildred D. Taylor
Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family’s struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social justice. And it is also Cassie’s story — Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$19.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
37
Add to Bookshelf
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (HBO Tie-In Edition)
by Philip Pullman
In this modern fantasy classic, Philip Pullman takes readers to a world where humans have animal familiars and where parallel universes are within reach.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$12.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
38
Add to Bookshelf
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
A modern classic — both poignant and funny — about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor’s dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
39
Add to Bookshelf
Skippyjon Jones
by Judy Schachner
Skippyjon Jones is no ordinary kitten. Oh, no … He’s actually El Skippito, a great sword-fighter ready to battle banditos the world over! With a little imagination and a whole lot of fun, this frisky cat dons a mask and cape and takes on a bad bumble-beeto to save the day. And along the way, he’ll be sure to steal young reader’s hearts, yes indeed-o!
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$8.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
40
Add to Bookshelf
Looking for Alaska
by John Green
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words — and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps. Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$12.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
41
Add to Bookshelf
Blood and Chocolate
by Annette Curtis Klause
Vivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen, she is beautiful and strong, and all the young wolves are on her tail. But Vivian still grieves for her dead father; her pack remains leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the suburbs of Maryland. She longs for a normal life. But what is normal for a werewolf?
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$9.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
42
Add to Bookshelf
Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope PĂ©rez
A dangerous forbidden romance rocks a Texas oil town in 1937, when segregation was a matter of life and death.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$14.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
43
Add to Bookshelf
Hair Love
by Matthew A. Cherry
It’s up to Daddy to give his daughter an extra-special hair style in this ode to self-confidence and the love between fathers and daughters, from Academy Award-winning director and former NFL wide receiver Matthew A. Cherry and New York Times bestselling illustrator Vashti Harrison.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$18.99Buy from Other Retailers:
