“Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”  “Is a filthy, filthy book.” Contains “anti-American attitudes, offensive language, political bias, and disturbing fiction.”  

These complaints were the basis for book challenges in libraries and schools in the United States.  Banned Books Week draws national attention to attempts to remove or restrict books and the harms of censorship.  The campaign promotes shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.  Learn more about banned and challenged books, including the top 10 most challenged books of 2016, at the American Library Association website. 

Penrose Library celebrates your freedom to READ!  Borrow a book from our display of selected challenged materials and stop by the circulation desk to get your own read a banned book sticker.

Complaints levied against A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien.  From Robert P. Doyle, Banned Books: Challenging Our Freedom to Read (Chicago: American Library Association, 2010), 282, 309, 319.