Apart from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter phenomenon, the most challenged books of the 21st century (2000-2005) include a number of books taught as classic and “relevant” books in terms of content and history.

In celebrating Banned Books Week (September 23-30, 2006), the American Library Association (ALA) compiled the top 10 most challenged books from 2000-2005, with the Harry Potter series of books leading the pack. The 10 most challenged books of the 21st Century (2000-2005) are:

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier
3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
5. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
6. “Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers
7. “It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie Harris
8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
10. “Forever” by Judy Blume

All but three of these books also were in the top 10 of the most challenged books of the 1990s. The ALA reports there were more than 3,000 attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries between 2000 and 2005. Challenges are defined as formal, written complaints filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.

I scan this perpetually developing list, and am continually confounded by the titles that emerge. Start with John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize-winning Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers in Great Depression-era California.

Based on Steinbeck’s own experiences as a bindle stiff in the 1920s (before the arrival of the Okies he would vividly describe in The Grapes of Wrath), the title is taken from Robert Burns’s poem, To a Mouse, which is often quoted as: “The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry,” though the phrase in the original Scots of the poem is “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.”

Required reading in many high schools, Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censors for what some consider offensive and vulgar language. Yes in high school, reading this text, along with The Pearl and Cannery Row, charted a new course in reading and in the understanding of the human condition.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a story about the pressures of living in a thoroughly racist society and how profoundly such a society shapes the character of an individual and the dynamics of a family.  It is a story of how one girl strived to surmount such pressures in rural Arkansas. Her story is representative of many African-Americans in the South at that time.

One out of 5,718 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.

Becca and Rochelle await the midnight hour and the last Harry Potter book

Some time ago, three generations of my family, myself included, some of us costumed to honor favored characters, stormed the bookstores for the midnight release of the final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. My granddaughter, in her Harry Potter Sorting Hat, and a friend stood guard at the shop’s storeroom door hoping for glimpse of,  … Oh my! Can it be? A book! Not a rock star. Not a movie idol. A BOOK.

Granted it was a big book. A special book. It was a book with all the answers to all the questions derived from the first six books in the series. Thus, somewhere around 2 a.m., five copies of the pre-ordered book in our house — everyone wanted “my own” copy, and we could not all read the same book at the same time.

J.K. Rowling, with her first scrawled story, got an entire generation of children to read books. Not read…devour, with an insatiable hunger for more.

I couldn’t help but remember years ago, when my daughter was little, how we always had books, and how a friend of mine was concerned about her young son’s disinterest in and difficulty with reading. The solution came in the form of comic book and a few heavily illustrated magazines on a subject he was engrossed in. Okay, he looked more at the photos in the beginning, but then he developed a craving to know what the printed words said.

Peak his interest first, I counseled. We can develop a bit more quality as we go along.

When my grandson was less than enthusiastic about books during the time I home schooled him, I used a similar strategy; he loved Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and that was my cue. I also developed an extensive list of “boy books” for a young teenager. The deal was, he had to read one of mine, and write a book report about it. Then he could pick a book, any book, any subject, from the library, read it and do a small book report on that. The freedom to choose was the impetus he needed.

I had him read Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, and I found a few adventure/creature stories by several authors he now craves. Buy one of those author’s book, new or used, and the entire 400-500 pages is done in a week. The concept of exploring new authors and genre’s has been planted, successfully.

What amuses me is the fact that many of the books on my “teen lest” are those “dangerous” banned books.

I tell my grandson to read them just to find out what the censors don’t want him to know. After all, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (for them). For the rest of us, well, we just can’t get to the bookstore fast enough.

I like to think they get their love of reading from me. Growing up, my family lived in a four room house, very big rooms, but only two bedrooms. At a certain age, my dad partioned one bedroom; my brother and I would each get half. As the eldest, I got first dibs. I left the room with the heat (a radiator for those New England winters) for him and chose the room with a cubby and a large closet, not for clothes hanging space, but for the ceiling to floor bookshelves I had my dad install along each wall. The simple act of taking stacked books from the floor, the windowsill and under my bed, filled two walls on that very first day. The lack of heat in that room was remedied with the purchase of an electric blanket.

My daughter always had books, and continues to forage for them at bookstores, thrift stores and yard sales. My “new baby” gifts for friends was always a collection of fairy tales or nursery rhymes; giving a child that first book became a trademark with me.

A dear friend of mine never really understood my addiction to the printed word. It wasn’t until tragedy wrapped itself around him, and he found that a book would make the time pass, could make the day brighter, could change his view of the world, that he began reading. “What took me so long,” he asked me, bemoaning the fact that there were so many books and so little time.

Trieu D. Tran (top) and Wesley John in EQUUS. Photo by Michael Lamont.

I tell Rochelle and her brother, Bobby, that this love of books is a “genetic thing,” that it is “all my fault,” passed on to them through their mother, from me. My other granddaughter, doesn’t care books, but has my “theater” and “arts” gene, and that’s fine too. I tell her about the time I took her mother, as the tender age of nine, to see “Equus” at the Williston Academy in Massachusetts. Viewing that play led to tremendous discussion on myriad subjects and helped instill a love of theater in her. It parallels the relationship we have with books; I can’t imagine our lives without books, without the arts and theater in all its forms.

Each year, when the American Library Association celebrates Banned Books Week, I make it a point to read a banned book (but it’s hard to find one since I’ve read most  on the list). I not only read Maya Angelou, for example, I stood at the back of a packed hall to hear her speak; on that night the program was delayed long enough to pipe the sound outside to a throng of 5,000 people who stood in the cold, waiting, wanting to hear her words and her readings. Of Mice and Men and all the Steinbeck works impressed me so much that when in California, I had my picture taken on the real “Cannery Row.”

At one point my daughter and had some 3,000 books, a number that was rudely edited by our house fire a few years ago. We have an ongoing search to replace old favorites, though the first editions and the autographed copies are, sadly, gone. We are slowly biulding back that personal library.

When I look at the passion and the relationship my family has with books, I smile. Books are not just paper and cloth covers or leather bindings, or the inexpesive newsprint paperbacks. Books, at least in my family, are friends. Best friends.

Banned Books Week:  Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week  of September each year.   Observed since 1982, the annual event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Association of College Stores. The Library of Congress Center for the Book endorses it.

Many bookstores and libraries across the nation join in the celebration with displays and readings of books that have been banned or threatened throughout history.  These include works ranging from the Bible to John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”Each year, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports on books and other materials that were “challenged” (their removal from school or library shelves was requested). The ALA estimates the number represents only about a quarter of the actual challenges.  “Most Challenged” titles include the popular “Harry Potter” series of fantasy books for children by J.K. Rowling.  The series drew complaints from parents and others who believe the books promote witchcraft to children.

The challenges reported reflect a continuing concern with a wide variety of themes.   Other “Most Challenged” titles include “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, for its use of language, particularly references to race; “It’s Perfectly Normal,” a sex education book by Robie Harris, for being too explicit, especially for children; and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for the description of rape she suffered as a child.

The date for Banned Books Week 2006 is September 23-September 30, 2006.

For more information, contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom at 800-545-2433, ext. 4223, or send e-mail to .

What gets targeted? Well, the usual and obvious suspects: J.D. Salinger, J.K. Rowling. John Steinbeck. Mark Twain. Robert Cormier. And writers such as Maya Angelou – someone out there wants her “Caged Bird” silenced forever. Even revered children’s authors including Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle and Judy Blume (whose penned scripted three of the top one hundred books).

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…

“If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

— On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

The Office for Intellectual Freedom tracks challenges to this literary aspect of our Civil Liberties, and while it currently updating totals from its 2000-2005 records, it offers some surprising and under-reported statistics for the ten year period that covered the 1990’s.

OIF recorded at least 6,364 challenges to shelved books available in America’s schools and libraries. The number of challenges and the number of reasons for those challenges do not match, because works are often challenged on more than one ground. Here’s a rundown of those objections:

• 1,607 were challenges to “sexually explicit” material ;
• 1,427 to material considered to use “offensive language”;
• 1,256 to material considered “unsuited to age group”;
• 842 to material with an “occult theme or promoting the occult or Satanism”;
• 737 to material considered to be “violent”;
• 515 to material with a homosexual theme or “promoting homosexuality”;
• 419 to material “promoting a religious viewpoint.”

Other reasons for challenges included “nudity,” “racism,” “sex education” and “anti-family”. Seventy-one percent of the challenges were to material in schools or school libraries. Another twenty-four percent were to material in public libraries . Sixty percent of the challenges were brought by parents, fifteen percent by patrons, and nine percent by administrators.

One hundred titles are listed here (I’ve read 52), the top 100 books challenged in the decade from 1990-2000 as listed by the Office for Intellectual Freedom.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Information and statistics courtesy of the Office for Intellectual Freedom

For more on banned books week see our special Banned Books Week Section