Banned Books On My Shelves

October 3, 2023 Top Ten Tuesday 13

Banned Books On My Shelves (a Top Ten Tuesday graphic)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The meme was originally the brainchild of The Broke and the Bookish.

Banned Books On My Shelves

Today’s official topic is Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year, but this is Banned Books Week, so I’m going rogue with Banned Books On My Shelves.

All of the books on this page have been banned or challenged in schools or public libraries at some point in my lifetime. Mind you, I haven’t listed all the banned/challenged books I have read over the years; that would be a longer list. These are just the books I currently own, either in print or digital versions. I have loved some of these and consider them keepers, and I’m looking forward to reading the others.

We actually used to own more banned and challenged books in print, but I have done several rounds of pruning our bookshelves over the last 10 years, so there are fewer now. The books I let go of were good, but either I replaced them with digital copies, or I don’t reread them often enough to devote the shelf space to them. (If and when I do want to reread them, there’s always the library or various used booksellers online.) Also, Robin took their own books with them when they moved out, so we lost some that way.

Books below are listed them alphabetically by author.

Print books

  • How To Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)
  • The Last Herald-Mage trilogy (Mercedes Lackey) (not pictured because I forgot to grab it off the shelf!)
  • To Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee)
  • A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
  • Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scot O’Dell)
  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J. K. Rowling) (and the whole series)
  • The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)
  • The Book Thief (Markus Zuzak)

Book banners today focus on books with LGBTQIA+ content, sexually explicit books, and books that discuss race or feature BIPOC characters (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.) Back in the ’90s and noughts, there were complaints from some conservative Christians about characters who were witches or practiced magic… hence the efforts to remove the Harry Potter books, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Lord of the Rings. (Never mind that the Narnia books are thinly disguised Christian allegory!) And of course, not all challenges come from the right; the left has challenged books which use racial slurs or contain racist attitudes, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn (listed below.)

Lark's Banned Books covers: Digital books. Titles include The Hunger Games; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; Julie of the Wolves; Stranger in a Strange Land; Freakonomics; The Call of the Wild; A Court of Thorns and Roses; A Court of Mist and Fury; A Court of Wings and Ruin; Wicked; The Golden Compass; The Color Purple; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Digital books (Kindle or audio)

  • The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
  • Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)
  • Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George)
  • Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
  • Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
  • The Call of the Wild (London)
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas)
  • A Court of Mist and Fury (Maas)
  • A Court of Wings and Ruin (Maas)
  • Wicked (Maguire)
  • The Golden Compass (Pullman)
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain)
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
  • The Color Purple (Walker)

I also have digital editions of most of the books I own in print.

Do you own any banned or challenged books?

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13 Responses to “Banned Books On My Shelves”

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      It was challenged in 2009 (I forget where, and I don’t know if it was removed from the library or curriculum then.) It was removed from public school libraries in Martin Co., FL, in 20203, based on objections from a one person. And it has probably been banned elsewhere since then, given that a lot of the vocal book banners are working from the same lists of books, and have usually not read the books they are objecting to.

      We knew several families in our community that didn’t allow their kids to read the HP books. I don’t really understand the reasoning. I was delighted that our child loved the HP books so much, not only because they’re fun, but because there are some really good lessons in them about standing up for what’s right even when the authorities are wrong, and about what the slide into authoritarianism and fascism can look like.

  2. Cindy's Book Corner

    We are Christians and we own (gasp) eight of these books. I don’t think books should be banned, I think it’s ridiculous. We should all have the freedom to read whatever books we want or to ignore books we don’t want to read. How hard is that? Several others have done this topic today as well, it is interesting to see what books are banned.
    Cindy’s Book Corner recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday-Reading goals I still need to work towardMy Profile

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      We are too, and I totally agree that it’s ridiculous. School librarians are trained to evaluate books for the age of their audience, for one thing, so truly age-inappropriate books are unlikely to be in an elementary or middle-school library to begin with. And a lot of the books being banned deal with race or sexual or gender identity—even just having characters who are LGBTQIA+ can get a book challenged or withdrawn. That says a lot about what the book-banners really want and what they’re afraid of.

      Personally, I believe that it’s important for kids to see themselves reflected in the books they read, and just as important for them to read about people whose experiences are different from their own. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is one of the things fiction in particular does really well, and it helps develop empathy and respect for other people… something we really need a lot more of in this world.

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      Control over what people think, I guess. Certainly, control over which ideas, experiences, and histories are considered normal, and which are “abnormal” and therefore marginalized. At the heart of it, I think people who try to ban books are afraid: of change, of losing power, and of how a more diverse nation would challenge their own beliefs and ideologies and those of their children.