The Alarming Arithmetic (And Why It’s Almost Beside the Point)
Last summer I decided to do something slightly unhinged: I read every book that made the most-banned list for 2024. Not because I’m a masochist. Not even because I wanted to feel morally superior. I did it because the numbers were making me crazy, and I needed to understand what was actually happening beneath the statistics.
Here’s what the numbers say: Between July 2023 and June 2024, there were 10,046 documented instances of book banning in American public schools. That’s a 65% spike from the year before. According to the PEN America Book Ban Index 2024, this represents the most aggressive suppression we’ve seen in recent memory. Florida alone accounts for 40% of all removals. The trend is undeniably alarming.
But numbers are funny things. They’re precise and terrifying and also completely unable to capture the actual reading experience. They can’t tell you how a book makes you feel, what it forces you to reconsider, or why someone decided it was dangerous enough to remove from a shelf.
Two Books That Won’t Go Away (And What That Means)
George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer held the number one and two spots for the third consecutive year on the American Library Association most challenged books list. I read them back-to-back one October weekend, and I understood immediately why they’re targeted. They don’t apologize. They don’t soften the edges.
Johnson’s memoir is structured like conversations with his younger self. It’s tender and honest about sexuality and race and family disappointment. Kobabe’s graphic memoir uses simple, gorgeous illustrations to map their gender non-conformity and sexual identity. Neither book is trying to convince you of anything. They’re just existing, which is apparently the most radical act available.
The reason these books keep getting banned is the same reason they keep getting bought. After a high-profile removal, sales for challenged books surge an average of 300% within 30 days, according to data from independent booksellers. The ban itself becomes advertising. But here’s the part that matters: the people buying them aren’t just activists making a political point. They’re teenagers who see themselves on the page for the first time. They’re parents trying to understand their kids. They’re readers who wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
The Deserved Obscurity Test
I’ve been thinking about literary archaeology lately. There are books that deserved to be forgotten. Books that were aggressively mediocre, that got published because of timing or connections, that contributed nothing to the conversation and nobody mourns their absence. Every genre has them. Every decade produced them.
The banned books of 2025 are not in that category. I’ve read a lot of disposable literature. I know what it feels like. These books are getting banned precisely because they’re competent and compelling and they ask questions that the people doing the banning find genuinely unsettling. That’s different from obscurity. That’s threat.
I read LGBTQ+ memoirs and YA novels centered on race. I read books about reproductive autonomy and books that use casual profanity and books that don’t center white perspectives. Some of them were extraordinary. Some were just good. None of them were the thing I was afraid I’d find: propaganda masquerading as literature, or didacticism so heavy-handed it crushed the actual storytelling. They were books. Complicated, specific, human books.
What Public Opinion Quietly Changed
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: in 2022, 64% of American adults opposed removing books from school libraries. As of January 2025, that number jumped to 71%. That’s a quiet but significant shift. More people are realizing that banning books doesn’t erase the ideas in them. It just moves them underground and makes them forbidden and therefore more interesting.
I noticed something while reading through the banned books. They’re not hard to find. They’re bestsellers. They’re in independent bookstores and public libraries and available for purchase in multiple formats. The bans aren’t stopping access for determined readers. They’re just creating a class system where some kids get to read certain books and some don’t, depending on their zip code and their school board’s composition.
That’s the real story the numbers can’t quite capture. It’s not about whether these books are good. Most of them are. It’s about who gets to decide what ideas are safe for young people to encounter, and what happens when we decide that safety requires erasure.
What Happens When You Read Them Anyway
After finishing my unhinged summer project, I didn’t feel enlightened or politically energized. Mostly I felt sad. Not because the books were sad, though some were. I felt sad because I kept thinking about the teenagers in Florida and Texas and other states where the removal rates are highest. I thought about a kid who might have found themselves in one of these books and instead found an empty shelf.
There’s a version of this essay where I tell you that reading banned books is a form of resistance, which it is but also isn’t. It’s not resistance if you’re not already inclined to read them. It’s just reading. The actual resistance is the teenager who passes their copy to their best friend. It’s the librarian who finds legal workarounds. It’s the parent who drives to the next county to check out a book. It’s the public opinion shift that says, quietly and persistently: we don’t agree with this.
Have you read any of the most challenged books? What did they make you think or feel or question? I’m genuinely curious what the experience was like from your side of it. There’s something important happening in these conversations between readers, and I don’t think we should let it happen only in the margins.