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We celebrate Banned Books Week to honor our freedom to read, defend free speech and give space for diverse human perspective and experience. Openly discussing censorship upholds the right of every individual to seek and receive information from all points of view, protects marginalized voices, foster critical thinking, and build empathy. Explore part of our collection of “banned” books below or see our October display for more.
Banned for offensive language and being sexually explicit.
The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
Banned for “Lewd or offensive material.”
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts of an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.
Banned for profane language, sexual content, themes of violence and drug use.
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days, grappling with feelings of loneliness, grief, and alienation. His search for something genuine in a world that feels insincere and superficial remains urgent and unmistakably modern.
Banned for portrayal of graphic sexual situations and degrading content.
Every expectant parent will tell you that they don’t want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they’d been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of “luckier” parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it’s all worth it because Willow is, funny as it seems, perfect. She’s smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health. Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte had known earlier of Willow’s illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life?
Banned for controversial depiction of mental illness and psychiatric institutions.
Kirk Douglas played on Broadway as a charming rogue who contrives to serve a short sentence in an airy mental institution rather in a prison. This, he learns, was a mistake. He clashes with the head nurse, a fierce artinet. Quickly, he takes over the yard and accomplishes what the medical profession has been unable to do for twelve years; he makes a presumed deaf and dumb Indian talk. He leads others out of introversion, stages a revolt so that they can see the world series on television, and arranges a rollicking midnight party with liquor and chippies. For one offense, the head nurse has him submit to shock treatment. The party is too horrid for her and she forces him to submit to a final correction a frontal lobotomy.
Banned for sexual content, offensive language, underage drinking/smoking, and LGBTQIA+ content.
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words–and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called “The Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Banned for sexually explicit material, graphic language, and underlying “socialist-communist agenda.”
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove–a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others–who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Banned for gang violence, underage drinking/smoking, strong language and family dysfunction.
No one ever said life was easy. But Ponyboy is pretty sure that he’s got things figured out. He knows that he can count on his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. And he knows that he can count on his friends–true friends who would do anything for him, like Johnny and Two-Bit. But not on much else besides trouble with the Socs, a vicious gang of rich kids whose idea of a good time is beating up on “greasers” like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect–until the night someone takes things too far.
Banned for concerns it promoted disobedience, violence, suicide, Satanism, and cannibalism.
A Light in the Attic delights with remarkable characters and hilariously profound poems in a collection readers will return to again and again.
Staff Picks
See what everyone is reading at the library!
There is something wrong at the House of Usher. Its walls seem to whisper. Its halls hold secrets. And its inhabitants are haunted by something they cannot escape. When an old friend arrives at the Usher estate, he finds Roderick Usher in a state of growing terror—and as the strange events inside the house unfold, the line between fear, madness, and the supernatural begins to disappear. Join Short Story Club for a discussion of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most chilling and enduring tales on Thursday, October 8th at 10 am.
An unlikely pair of widows find love, adventure and the wilds of Big Sky Country in Marrying Montana, a memoir by Gail Cushman and Robert Mitchell. Come support local authors with a book reading and signing on Saturday, October 10th at 10:30 am. Copies will be available for purchase for $10.
Ms. Marguerite is reading a book on North American folk magic. Drawing on the expertise of twenty-four renowned practitioners, this book features contemporary folk traditions from all over North America. Diverse as the landscapes they thrive on, these authentic practices will expand your worldview and inspire you to enrich your own spirituality. Explore the history, tools, and spiritual beliefs of many different paths of folk magic from Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
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