The State of Book Bans
How does Iowa stack up?
Tomorrow October 11 is Freedom to Read Day. Iowa ranked fifth in the U.S. for book bans in the 2024-2025 school year, with 113, according to PEN America, an organization committed to protect freedom of expression in literature. This is down from 3,671 in 2023-2024.
Here are the top 10 banned books in Iowa:
Nineteen Minutes Jodi Picolt
Looking for Alaska John Green
Sold Patricia McCormick
Thirteen Reasons Why Jay Asher
The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky
The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
Crank Helen Hopkins
The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
Identical Ellen Hopkins
The Color Purple Alice Walker
As Banned Books Week comes to a close, there’s still time to take at least one action to help protest censorship. Go to bannedbooksweek.org to find specific ideas. Could you check out or buy a banned book (then donate it), contribute to a Little Free Library, or volunteer at your local library? Or, join the Banned Books Festival at the Franklin Center tomorrow! Look for Iowa Writers’ Collaborative members to be there.
This month marks my third year of writing Unfinished Business, a weekly column under the IWC’s umbrella. Thank you for your words of encouragement, readership, and support! I hope you enjoy this 2023 column tailor-made for Freedom to Read Day.
Are Books the Real Threat to our Kids?
As a kid growing up on the farm, my mom always knew where to find me: “You were sitting in a corner, with your nose stuck in a book,” she would say.
Mom encouraged reading, but like many kids, I tended to avoid my household chores. When I was in fourth grade, a teacher called me out for reading a book instead of working on my assignment for the next day. (I never was late with my assignments!)
Most of the books I read were checked out from the school or the tiny brick library in Hornick, Iowa. On Wednesdays, the upper elementary students were allowed to walk a couple of blocks to the library over our lunch hour. The most exciting event for readers like me was the day when the bookmobile rolled into town with a fresh supply of books.
My grandparents lived on the same farm as my family. Sometimes I’d read Grandpa’s Zane Grey westerns, but Grandma was an even more avid reader. I distinctly recall a few times when Mom discouraged me from reading books from Grandma’s bookshelves. She said that Gone with the Wind was too adult. (I read it, anyway) She also didn’t want me to read Spirit Lake by MacKinlay Kantor. Granted, his language was offensive to many of his fellow Iowans in 1961, when this book was published. In response to the criticism, Kantor replied that he only wrote about many of the same matters found in the Bible. (And, yes, I found a way to read his book, too.)
During her long lifetime, Grandma traveled to several World Fairs across the U.S., and visited family members living in urban areas. Eventually a hearing impairment led her to spend most of her days on the farm. She was 85 years old when she read To Kill a Mockingbird. It was made into a movie that arrived at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Sioux City in 1962. We weren’t movie-goers, but Grandma reached into her “pocketbook” and paid for all four of us to buy tickets. (I also read the book.)
I never asked Grandma why she felt it was so important for her white, Iowa farm grandkids to see this Pulitzer-prize winning story of a white lawyer’s defense of a black man against a false rape charge by a white woman. But her perspective wasn’t shared by others who have kept it on a top 10 list of challenged books over the past six decades.
Today Grandma’s original copies of these three books, Gone with the Wind (motion picture edition), Spirit Lake, and To Kill a Mockingbird are on my bookshelves. Considering the current emotional tsunami threatening books today in Iowa, and other states, I was curious to find out how many challenged or banned books I own. Of course, the list includes classics like Grapes of Wrath, Mark Twain, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Where the Wild Things Are, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of a Young Girl, and more.
Fast forward a few decades, and our daughters added books to our home library. Most were ordered from The Weekly Reader, or purchased from bookstores. I never questioned their book choices, and I never confronted their teachers or the librarian regarding specific books. I trusted them to do their jobs. In fact, I had no idea that the Harry Potter series, Where’s Waldo, and one of my daughter’s favorite books, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, are included on some banned book lists. A Wrinkle in Time, published in 1962, was criticized for being too “complicated” for children. It also had a plucky female protagonist, and “mixed” religion and science in a kind of “witchy” way.
I recently learned that I should add The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, an avowed atheist, to this list. When it was made into a movie in 2007, some described it as an attack on organized religion, especially Catholicism. The Giver, a 1993 Newbery Award winner, also is suspect because of its references to infanticide, suicide, and sex.
I stopped counting when I reached 35+ challenged or banned books on my bookshelves.
Subhead
I’ve been on the other school side of the book wars, too. During a short stint of teaching English and literature to middle and high school kids in a northeastern Nebraska farm community in the ‘70s, I was assigned two senior classes, divided into “college-bound” and “non-college bound.” With labels like these, you only can imagine how difficult it was to engage the latter students in reading. Looking back, I think some of my assigned books would be challenged today. The Pigman, published in 1968 focused on two teens from dysfunctional families who developed a friendship with a reclusive elderly man. It ended in an emotional betrayal, and the Pigman’s tragic death. Many of my rural students also were rebelling against authority, abusing alcohol, and skipping school. The Contender was an award-winning novel about a black teenager in Harlem who found his way out of drugs and the street life by becoming a boxer. I felt it was important that these kids without a single nonwhite classmate had the opportunity to step into the shoes of an urban, black teenager living in poverty. I never heard from any parent with an objection to these assigned books.
What has changed? Today’s tactics are different, along with a climate of extreme politicization, as well as the ubiquitous influence of social media. During the 2021-2022 school year, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries. The bans affected 138 school districts in 32 states, according to a report from PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting free expression in literature. And the number of bans is increasing yearly.
Prior to 1999, most controversies focused on obscene language and sexual content. Today, much of the uproar stems from anti-elitism: Parents increasingly consider themselves experts, and lack a fundamental respect for anyone with more credentials. Another obvious motivation is fanning the flames of culture wars-- using the traditional hot button wedge issues of religion, sex, violence. Today, transgender and LGBTQ issues are at the forefront in Iowa.
Most of all, what is new about today’s efforts to ban or challenge books is a willingness to use local and state governing bodies to control teachers and what students should learn. The Republican principle of limited local government is being trampled into the ground when we read of proposals to extrapolate from the banning of a single book in one school district to a blanket statewide condemnation.
Subhead
On the other end of the spectrum, I ‘m also appalled by liberal efforts to whitewash literature that doesn’t measure up to politically correct standards. For instance, new editions of British author, Roald Dahl’s books, including James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda, substitute the word “parents” for mothers and fathers, “Cloud People” for Cloud Men, and “enormous” for enormously fat. Miss Trunchbull no longer has a “horsey” face. With advice from a group called Inclusive Minds, “His father was a farmer” was edited to “His parents were farmers.” I didn’t know at the time our daughters were reading his books and seeing his movies that Dahl had made antisemitic comments throughout his life. Although it’s disappointing, I’m not sure what it has to do with his books for children.
I’m more ambivalent about older classics. I went through a phase when I read every book in the Nancy Drew series. The books, originally written in the 1930s, apparently included racial and social stereotypes. They were revised in 1959. I loved the books because Nancy was a female heroine who was adventuresome, and smart. I have a few copies of Nancy Drew books written in the 1990s that I gave our daughters--The Nancy Drew Notebooks and the Nancy Drew Files. Today her faithful sidekicks include Beth as a non-white girl and George, as lesbian.
Our older daughter loved the Little House on the Prairie series, and our family visited all of the Ingalls Wilder home sites, with the exception of the final one in the Missouri Bootheel. I know the perspective of these books is not politically correct. The author was a product of her own times. What do we do with these beloved books? Can they serve as a jumping off point for discussions about historical context? What makes for a good society? What is my role in society?
As for my three vintage books from Grandma’s shelves, they’re controversial today for different reasons that evolved through the decades: the marginalizing of people of color, racial slurs, and celebrating white saviorhood. They must be viewed within context, and it’s questionable if any should be required reading. But they have a place.
Subhead
Both movements, from the political right and political left, would argue that their goal is to protect children. However, when I consider what is damaging to kids in our world today, my focus goes far beyond the books they may encounter in their schools or at public libraries. Books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, with its descriptions of child abuse and rape, and Maus, a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the genocide of the Holocaust, certainly evoke discomfort, guilt, anguish, and other ugly emotions.
Of course, we prefer that our children live in a world that’s familiar, comfortable, and safe, free of poverty, pain, and inequity. But my gaze is riveted much closer to home on real-life atrocities that wound and warp our children. I can’t stop thinking about the 14-year-old boy who committed suicide earlier this month at the intersection of Highway 169 and Highway 6 in Adel, population, 6153. Although we don’t have many answers today, we do know that bullying at school was a precipitating factor. We also know that no one protected from gaining access to a firearm.
I’ll never forget 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard and her younger friend who were offered a ride by a stranger in 2013 as they walked home from school in the neighboring town of Dayton, population 943. Kathlynn was raped and killed a few miles from our home, and her younger friend escaped certain death by running through the fields, ditches, and woods to get help. She faces years of therapy. These girls would not have been protected by misguided efforts to shield them from an awareness of the dangers of predators in our world.
Books are mirrors and windows. They both reflect and represent our world, and highlight the issues that our teens are likely to encounter: The good, the bad, and the ugly.
In this time when we are confronting book bans and challenges about what our kids can be taught or read, as well as selective editing to make our kids feel more comfortable, it seems like a slippery slope.
In the book, The Giver reminds Jonas, “You and I are the only ones with access to the books.” At its core, the struggle revolves around control. Who gets the power to rewrite books?
I’m proud to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Meet our writers here, or subscribe to our free weekly roundups, “our Sunday morning newspaper,” and our Wednesday “flipside” edition featuring sports, music, culture, and other topics. Thank you!
So important to keep this in the public eye. Thank you Cheryl.
WOW! Quite a testimony . Your columns offer great insight!