Book of the Week: Top 10 Banned Books of 2011

This week, the American Library Association released its annual list of the top 10 most challenged books of 2011.  As we’ve discussed during Banned Books Week last Fall, “challenged” books are books that members of the public, parents, or school boards formally seek to remove from library shelves because they view the content as offensive or inappropriate.   Challenges occur most frequently in school and public libraries and typically involve materials for children and young adults.

This year’s 10 most censored books are wide-ranging and include: pop culture teen lit (Gossip Girl, TTYL series), educational  children’s nonfiction (My Mom’s Having a Baby), bestselling science fiction (Hunger Games), national prize-winners (Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), and classics (Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird).

According to ALA, the most challenged books in the United States in 2011 were:

1)      ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2)      The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

3)      The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence

4)      My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

5)      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

6)      Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint

7)      Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit

8)      What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit

9)      Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
Drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit

10)    To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Offensive language; racism

Have you read any of these banned books?  Do you think they should have been banned from schools or public libraries?  You can search the Library’s catalog to check these titles out from our collections or try Interlibrary Loan for the titles that we do not own.  (As an academic research library without a children’s or youth section, we tend not to collect children’s and young adult literature, but we do have some cross-over bestsellers like Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games in our Popular Reading Collection.)

If you’d like to suggest  materials for the Library’s collections, just email us.