This year marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, founded in 1982 by library activist Judith Krug and sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, National Association of College Stores, and endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. We encourage everyone to sit down with a frequently banned or challenged book this week and enjoy a little taste of intellectual freedom that some knucklehead didn’t want you to have. A common feature of many of the banned and challenged books is precisely that they challenge limitations on intellectual freedom, criticize conformity, and propose a more radically open and liberated vision of the world–-in short, they challenge the type of thinking that would want to ban books in the first place, as this video from Booksmans illustrates: 

So, head to the American Library Association’s website to check out their interactive timeline of banned books. If you want a subversive classic to read, look at their list of banned/challenged classics from the list of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. Some of our favorites are there: 1984, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Invisible Man, even The Lord of the Rings!

According to BannedBooksWeek.org the top 10 most challenged books of 2011:

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence
4. My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit
8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
   Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
    Reasons: offensive language; racism

Bill Moyers is the honorary co-chair of this year’s Banned Books Week:

Whoopi Goldberg is one of many participating in the Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out: