‘Banned Books Week’ Has Even More Urgency Today

“Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

“I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

“For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

Walt Whitman’s included “For You O Democracy,” as part of his “Calamus” series of poems first introduced in the 1860 (3rd) edition of his magnum opus collection, Leaves of Grass.

I began my reading and continued my designated half-hour with the “Calamus” poems at the Boston Center for the Arts in the historic South End of Boston in the late 1980s during that year’s Banned Books Week’s educational efforts across the United States to highlight censored materials throughout the country’s history continuing to the present day.

This annual event, which was launched in 1982, brings together librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers to focus on intellectual freedom and to draw attention to the harms of censorship.

I chose to read Whitman’s “Calamus” poems – his group of 39 poems – exploring deep intimate male friendships, strong emotional bonding, and same-sex affection. Whitman called this “adhesive love” or the “manly love of comrades,” which he asserted is one of the bases to bring together and stabilize American democracy.

The “Calamus” poems are clearly homoerotic. Kalamos in Greek mythology turned into a reed in grief for his young male lover, Karpos, who drowned. The Acorus calamus is the name given to a marsh plant. For Whitman, his “Calamus” poems represent the kind of love between Kalamos and Karpos.

Shortly after the book’s publication, officials removed it from library shelves at Harvard University and placed it in a locked cabinet with other books thought to undermine students’ morals. Whitman was fired from his job at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The American Library Association released its “Top 11 Most Challenged Books List of 2025.” It is part of the 2026 State of America’s Libraries Report addressing the ongoing challenges libraries face daily.

Here are the 11 most challenged books of 2025:

1. Soldby Patricia McCormick

Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her poor mountain home in Nepal thinking that she is to work in the city as a maid only to find that she has been sold into the sex slave trade in India and that there is no hope of escape. (Fiction, Young Adult)

2. The Perks of Being a Wallflowerby Stephen Chbosky

A coming-of-age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend. (Fiction, Young Adult)

3. Gender Queer: A Memoirby Maia Kobabe

Using e/em/eir pronouns, this is Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charting eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. (Non-Fiction, Young Adult)

4. Empire of Stormsby Sarah J. Maas

The long path to the throne has only just begun for Aelin Galathynius. Loyalties have been broken and bought, friends have been lost and gained, and those who possess magic find themselves at odds with those who don’t. As the kingdoms of Erilea fracture around her, enemies must become allies if Aelin is to keep those she loves from falling to the dark forces poised to claim her world. (Fiction, Young Adult)

5. (tie) Last Night at the Telegraph Clubby Malinda Lo

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father–-despite his hard-won citizenship–-Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day (Fiction, Young Adult)

6. (tie) Tricksby Ellen Hopkins

Tricks is a young adult verse novel by Ellen Hopkins, released in August 2009. It tells the converging narratives of five troubled teenage protagonists. (Fiction, Young Adult)

7. A Court of Thorns and Rosesby Sarah J. Maas

Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from stories, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal, but Tamlin, a High Lord of the faeries. As her feelings toward him transform from hostility to a fiery passion, the threats against the faerie lands grow. Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose Tamlin forever. (Fiction, Young Adult)

8. (tie) A Clockwork Orangeby Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. (Fiction, Adult)

9. (tie) Identicalby Ellen Hopkins

Sixteen-year-old identical twin daughters of a district court judge and a candidate for the United States House of Representatives, Kaeleigh and Raeanne Gardella desperately struggle with secrets that have already torn them and their family apart (Fiction, Young Adult)

10. (tie) Looking for Alaskaby John Green

Sixteen-year-old Miles’ first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks, but it is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash. (Fiction, Young Adult)

11. (tie) Storm and Furyby Jennifer L. Armentrout

Eighteen-year-old Trinity Marrow may be going blind, but she can see and communicate with ghosts and spirits. Her unique gift is part of a secret that is so dangerous that she’s been hiding for years in an isolated compound fiercely guarded by Wardens—gargoyle shape-shifters who protect humankind from demons. If the demons discover the truth about Trinity, they’ll devour her, flesh and bone, to enhance their own powers. (Fiction, Young Adult)

ALA President Sam Helmick stated in the semiquincentennial year of the United States:

“As we look toward the next 250 years, the choice is ours,” he claimed. “We can let our libraries fade, viewed as charming relics of a bygone era. Or, we can choose to invest in them as a bedrock of our future. Let us decide, right now, that they are not optional. They are the very breath of a free society and they are worth fighting for.”

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, second highest to 4,240 documented in 2023.

Of the books challenged in 2025, 1,671 (40%) represent the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.

In 2025, though less than 3% of the challenges came from individual parents, fully 92% of all book challenges originated through pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers.

“In 2025, book bans were not sparked by concerned parents, and they were not the result of local grassroots efforts,” said Sarah Lamdan, Executive Director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “They were part of a well-funded, politically-driven campaign to suppress the stories and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals and communities.”

ALA differentiates a “ban” from a “challenge” whereas a “ban” it defines as the removal of materials from a library based on the objections of a person or group. A “challenge” is an attempt to have a library resource removed, or access to it restricted, based on the objections of a person or group.

Updating the APA’s challenged books for 2025, the group PEN America, found that nearly 12,000 books were banned in U.S. public schools during the 2025-2026 school year. Among all the U.S. states, Texas alone accounted for more than 8,000 of these in the same state that now mandates all 5.5 million public school students read Bible stories.

The 2026 Banned Books Week is commemorated October 4-10, under the theme “Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read.”

A Legacy of Book Bans and Challenges

President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke up against the concerted campaign of censorship in the United States during his commencement address at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire on June 14, 1953:

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book….”

The President’s remarks were well received by the graduating seniors and by the faculty. Eisenhower, by no means a political radical, knew full well the horrors of authoritarian regimes that banned the free exchange of ideas.

Following his graduation from West Point, he rose to the rank of five-star General. He ultimately served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied expeditionary force in Europe during World War II against fascism. He had seen firsthand the prophetic reality of words penned by German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine in 1821:

“It was just the prelude….Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.”

Nazis and aligned university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German.” The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.”

On May 10, 1933, the students, along with Nazi leaders, set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, “fired” up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers near the Berlin Opera House by declaring “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state,” and “This is the end of Jewish intellectualism.”

Though most of the books torched that night were written by Jews, of the 200 authors, others included liberals, Communists, and political dissenters. Targeted books comprised works of Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and many others, and yes, also Heinrich Heine.

Preceding this event by a mere four days, Nazi storm troopers invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher.

The Institute conducted early sexuality and gender research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States. Storm troopers carried away and torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”

During their rampage of Europe, Nazis burned an estimated 100 million books between 1933-1945 in territories occupied by German troops.

At Dartmouth College that day in 1953, President Eisenhower continued his commencement address by asking the graduates to “not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America,” he reminded the gathering. “And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

The policy team of the group, American Atheists, has recently tracked 28 bills in 14 U.S. states that have or would ban books. We the people, determined and unified, have the power to reverse this autocratic trend.