The week has gotten away from me, but make no mistake, it’s Banned Books Week, a week to celebrate your freedom to read… and perhaps metaphorically walk in someone else’s shoes for a few hundred pages.
As always, both the Banned Books Week site and the American Library Association (ALA) have a number of resources, from the Top 10 Challenged Books of 2024 to a 20-page PDF about the state of America’s libaries. The latter includes stats not only expected and surprising on censorship (by me, anyway), but also some nice vignettes about how libraries are continuing to innovate to serve their communities.
While I don’t have multiple posts this year, you can check out my now many posts about Banned Books Week whether it’s learning how the people removing books don’t like to follow their own rules, questioning why novels can be considered dangerous, or how to call out book-burning rat bastards with stylish dignity.
Also, if none of 2024’s top 10 was a draw, you can check out the ALA’s archive going back to the 1990s. Harper’s Bazaar, well known rabble-rousing rag that it is, compiled a list of banned books by state that I shared two years ago, but is sure to give you some ideas. For this year, I’ve read a number of books that have been banned, removed, or otherwise challenged, including How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This last book was a re-read, since I hadn’t read it this century, and I appreciated how much of it remained topical and fresh.
Finally, the challenged books I read this year are only three of the 31 total books I’ve read so far this year and yes, that happens specifically because I wanted to read more this year than in recent years, however this quest was aided and abetted by two software tools.
The first would be Libby, an app used by thousands of public libraries and quite possibly yours. It allows you to check out e-books and audiobooks with ease, including putting holds so you can immediately dive into another book right after you finish your current read. Not only that, you can have library cards from several different library systems and Libby will check all the collections to find out where you can get a given book sooner (or books not available in other systems).
The second tool is Storygraph: a site (and app) that some friends let me know about. If you’ve used Goodreads, it’s similar in that you document what you’ve been reading and provides a community of fellow readers (this latter feature is one I haven’t used yet). Besides the fun stats you can pore over in terms of book genres, length, and average days it takes you to read a book, the killer feature for me is its recommendations. Based on what you’ve been reading and how you’ve been rating your reads, the app will provide a recommendation that notes what elements the possible book has in common with what you’ve been reading as well as how highly you rated said books. Then, it lets you know how the new book may match your current reading “mood” or diverge from it, never being so gauche as to state “don’t read this,” more noting where your current tastes may be. If you’ve ever been scrolling though Netflix offerings wondering what to watch next, you’ll understand the appeal. Okay, the fun stats probably win out, mainly because each finished book slightly tweaks the genre count (which gets ultra-specific) among other stats.
But the big thing goes beyond just reading banned books: I’m sure reading all these books has energized my writing this year, so if you’re a writer, perhaps feeling sluggish or plagued by some form of writer’s block, break through with some reading.