Banned Books Worth Reading

A fireman whose job is burning books begins, secretly, to read them. Bradbury's target is less the state than a public that stopped wanting to read, which is what makes it sting now. Its own publishing history is the joke telling itself: for years an expurgated school edition quietly cut the language, until the unedited text was restored.

One caveat: The middle sags, and the women in it are thin.

A lawyer in Depression-era Alabama defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman, seen by his young daughter. It has been challenged for sixty years over its racial slurs and its depictions of racism, and more recently argued about for making a white lawyer the moral center of a Black man's trial.

One caveat: Its moral clarity is more comforting than the subject deserves.

Two migrant laborers in California share a plan for a small farm neither is likely to get. It is short enough to read in one sitting, and the last page is one of the most argued-over endings in American fiction. The objections are usually profanity, racial slurs and that ending.

One caveat: Grim, and the ending is the point rather than a twist.

A clerk in a surveillance state begins keeping a diary, which is already a crime. It is challenged from opposite directions — for its politics by some, for its sexual content by others — which is a fair sign of how little the book flatters any side.

One caveat: Bleak, and the long book-within-the-book stalls the story.

A woman is conscripted as a reproductive servant in a theocracy built on the ruins of the United States. Atwood's rule was to include nothing that had not happened somewhere, which is the detail that makes the objections — sexual content and anti-religious themes — worth weighing against the book itself.

One caveat: Harrowing, and the ending withholds more than some readers want.

A formerly enslaved woman in Ohio is haunted by the daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize and it is challenged constantly, for violence and sexual content that the subject does not allow Morrison to soften.

One caveat: Non-linear and demanding; not a book to read while tired.

A young Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, believing they would make her lovable. Morrison's first novel is short, exact and devastating about what a culture's idea of beauty does to a child, and it recurs near the top of the challenge lists year after year.

One caveat: Depicts the rape of a child directly. The objection is about real content.

A freshman stops speaking after she is raped at a summer party, and spends a year finding a way to say it. It is on school reading lists and challenge lists at the same time; one widely reported campaign against it called the rape scenes pornographic, which readers of the book have generally found hard to recognize.

One caveat: Depicts sexual assault and its aftermath, for a teenage audience.

A shy freshman writes letters to a stranger about his first year of high school and the older students who take him in. The voice is the whole book, and the objections — drug use, sexual content, LGBTQ characters — are a fair summary of what a teenager's year can contain.

One caveat: Sexual abuse, suicide and drug use.

A sixteen-year-old is the only witness when a police officer shoots her unarmed childhood friend, and has to decide what to say and to whom. Challenges usually cite profanity, drug references and a claim that it is anti-police; the novel spends most of its length on a family rather than on a side.

One caveat: Police violence and grief, described from close up.