Since 2021, PEN America, the free speech advocacy nonprofit, has documented 23,000 instances of book banning—either removing books from public libraries and schools or restricting who can access them. According to Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs Daina Eglitis, who has taught a class on The Sociology of Banned Books, waves of censorship frequently target books with LGBTQIA+ characters and people of color. They’ve also swept up titles from Nobel Prize-winners like Toni Morrison, young adult classics by Judy Blume and John Green and bestsellers including “The Hunger Games”—Eglitis’ personal favorite banned book. As summer approaches, Eglitis drafted banned-book recommendations for readers looking to stir up more than sand at the beach.
“Sold” by Patricia McCormick
“Sold” is one of the most commonly banned books. It is a very, very powerful novel about the sex trafficking of a young Nepali girl. It has been challenged for having sexually explicit content and depictions of sexual violence—which, given the subject matter, it would be very difficult to obscure.
That said, it’s written in such beautiful and engaging language that it does more to help readers understand the trauma and significance of this topic than any statistic.
The narrative of a novel can not only inspire empathy, but also a recognition of someone else whose life you hopefully will never live, but can nonetheless come to understand. That’s something we talked about in my class—the importance of books as mirrors and windows. In a book, you can see yourself. But you can also look into others’ experiences and become more empathetic towards them. Through the novel, you’ve walked in their shoes.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson
This is the only nonfiction book we read in the class. I think it’s important because it features a character that is incredibly underrepresented in popular fiction and certainly in youth fiction— the first-person perspective of a queer African-American man. The reader follows George as they are growing up, discovering themselves and coming out to family, like their loving grandmother, and finding acceptance, as well as accepting themselves.
It gets banned for having sexual content and, of course, LGBTQIA+-related content. The sexual material isn’t intended to be provocative. It’s a recognition of teens coming of age and experiencing themselves in the world for the first time. It also represents an LGBTQIA+ character in a way that, the narrator writes, they would have wanted to be seen—as an understood, important and visible character.
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
Next I am going to recommend “Beloved.” A lot of people have read it and it remains an enormously important book. It was recently challenged [unsuccessfully] here in the DMV area, in Fairfax County Public Schools. It gets challenged for a number of things—infanticide, some sexual content, violence. Unfortunately, an area of growing bans is simply the depictions of the African-American experience in American history, including the experience of enslavement.
“Beloved” pushes back against the idea that the standard version of American history gives us—which is that slavery was over with the end of the Civil War.
Morrison draws our attention to the fact that people carried the trauma and legacies of slavery with them into the next generation and the generation after that and so on. These sorts of traumas don’t end simply because legal enslavement ended. “Beloved” teaches us more effectively about this experience than almost any history book can do.
“1984” by George Orwell
“The Giver” by Lois Lowry
For my final recommendation, I’m pairing two dystopian novels.
I’m going to recommend the graphic novel version of “1984.” Although Orwell’s prose is very powerful, in many ways the most memorable part of the book are its images. In class, we read the graphic novel because I wanted those images—like Room 101 where your worst nightmare comes true—to stick in students’ minds.
“1984” has become such a powerful cultural referent. We often make references to “doublespeak” or “memory holing.” I’m not sure people even realize this terminology comes from the book.
It’s banned for a variety of reasons—like having (very little) sexual content and being violent. But, of course, it’s depicting an authoritarian society so it would be difficult to imagine violence being entirely absent.
Most often it’s found objectionable for challenging authority. It’s been banned not only in the U.S. but in other countries around the world. There was an attempt to ban it in Florida for being supportive of communism—which is ridiculous because Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is a negative reflection of authoritarianism in the Soviet Union.
My class read “1984” together with Lois Lowry’s “The Giver,” which has been widely banned in schools. They’re both essentially about dystopian societies where social control is exercised over what people do and how they think.
But unlike “1984,” the dystopia in “The Giver” appears as a utopia. There’s no conflict, no violence, nobody argues. It looks like a smoothly-engineered and even pleasant society. But beneath that facade, all sorts of violence churns.
It’s been banned for featuring infanticide and euthanasia. But we almost never see it in the book itself. It’s hidden beneath the surface of this seemingly utopian dystopia.
That’s why I find “1984” and “The Giver” such an interesting pairing. They show how social control can be exercised both in the presence of explicit violence and coercion—and in its absence.