Banned Book Haul (and a History Lesson)

Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog!

I know I said that in 2025 I was going to seriously limit my book buying and only allow myself to buy two books per month...and truly I'm still holding onto that goal. But something has been eating away at me for a few weeks now, and so I've decided to just bite the bullet and go on a spree to buy up a bunch of regularly challenged and banned books.

This is something that I think everyone needs to know and pay attention to. For as long as books have been written, they have been banned. All the way back in 212 BCE (over 2,000 years ago), Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti, who begun the Qin dynasty, ordered all books in the kingdom of China to be burned save for a single copy of each (and even those were eventually destroyed) in an effort to rewrite history. The Roman poet Ovid was exiled from Rome because of his work The Art of Love. Shakespeare himself even came under fire by Queen Elizabeth I for his play Richard III. 

Even in the United States, where I live, book bans are nothing new. In fact, the first documented book ban in the US happened before America was even founded, in 1637. Thomas Morton's book The New English Canaan was banned by the Puritan government as it was a critique on Puritan customs and power structures. 

For a more comprehensive history of book bans, check out this article from Freedom to Read and this article from PEN America.

With all of these historical precedents running around in my head, as well as the knowledge that the country is facing the worst wave of book bans since the Red Scare in the 1950s, I felt there was a serious hole in my book collection. So I decided to spend a day at Barnes & Noble and grab all of the most commonly banned books I could find, before they weren't there anymore. (This might just be paranoia talking, but I'd rather be paranoid and have physical copies of these books than find out that I'm right and it be too late to do anything.)

In all honestly, I haven't read most of these (yet). The few that I did read were all for high school, which is more than ten years ago at this point. However, I am looking forward to reading all of these, especially through the lens of modern day. After all, there's a reason these books are being challenged, isn't there? I want to see what "they" are so afraid of.

In case it wasn't clear before, I don't believe in censorship.

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1984 by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day by Elie Wiesel

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

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These are just the books that I bought specifically, but I have other books that should also be considered in case any of you take inspiration from this post and go to pick these books up for yourselves.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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I hope that years down the line I can look at this post and think it was indeed just paranoia, but I can't see the future and neither can you. 

If anything can be taken from this blog post, it's that we should all pay close attention to what is happening in the world around us, and act accordingly. We can't all do something that will change the world, but even small things, like buying books, have the potential to make a difference.

Until next time, friends.