Banned Books Week with Books We Read (2020-2025)

Five years ago, in September 2020, the world was operating virtually due to Covid, but that didn’t prevent the small team of Books We Read at Chang Library from celebrating Banned Books Week for the first time. Partnering with student organizations, we co-hosted an event, where we presented flash talks and read from books that had been banned for various reasons.

The following year, we launched Summer Tales, an inaugural reading program in partnership with Rutgers Summer Session. This presented a great opportunity to introduce students to the concept of challenging and banning books with the help of our guest author, Carmen Maria Machado. Her book, In the Dream House: A Memoir, bothered parents in a school district enough to demand its removal from the reading lists for high school English class book clubs, which inspired us to explain why one should read banned books.

Since then, it has become a cherished tradition to raise awareness about censorship and the freedom to read, a mission that we take seriously throughout the year across campuses and continents.

The rest is history, as they say, but we keep it public and uncensored. Committed to intellectual freedom, we are proud to highlight a few of the thirty-six posts listed under the Banned Books category, written by ten contributors. Stay tuned for more during the week!

Here is a short recap of the past five years.

New to Banned Books Week?

• Guide to Banned Books: Curated by New Brunswick librarians (Becky Diamond, Megan Lotts, and Judit H. Ward), this LibGuide provides an overview of challenging books and a brief summary of events at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
• Introduction to Banned Books: A recap of our 2020 events, this post will walk you through the various reasons books can be challenged or banned from the perspective of literature, written by Nicholas Allred.
• Banned no more: Nancy Kranich, instructor at SC&I and former ALA President, takes a closer look at book bans and their dangers to democracy.
• Banned or challenged: If you ever wondered about the differences between the two terms, Judit H. Ward’s post will shed some light from a unique perspective.

Our most popular posts related to banned books

• Banned Books as a parenting tool: Viewed by nearly 10,000+ readers, the top post on the Books We Read blog roll was written by Becky Diamond on the potential of using banned books with your children for good parenting.
• What is a Zine? If you are not familiar with the term and its relationship with censorship, art librarian Megan Lotts will introduce you to the intriguing world of zines. Fun fact: zines are incredibly popular everywhere in 2025!
• The Banned Books of Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives: Archivist Tara Maharjan collected some famous examples available at Rutgers. How many of them have you read?

Students about Banned Books

• Rutgers students stand with the banned: A library instruction class turned into a Banned Books Week event, having impact not only on the students in the classroom, but on many other library users through the exhibits in four libraries.
• Browse a sample of posters created in the Fall 2023 Academic Mentoring classes held from September 25 – October 3.
• See also Banned Books students read (2019-2022), Poster Gallery 11, for book recommendations by SEBS students.
• Banned bestsellers: In library school, Julie Rossano was reading banned books for a class at SC&I, here are her recommendations.
• Slaughterhouse Five: Recreational reading to research paper: When Lindsey Jones in the Music PhD student serendipitously crossed over the reading barrier with a banned book.
• The James Baldwin Centennial Exhibit gave us another chance to look at his work, including his commitment to free speech. Danielle Pitter, who made the exhibit memorable for Books We Read, also wrote about her favorite banned books, to be continued this year.

Things you might have missed

• Intellectual Freedom Stories from a Shifting Landscape: Not necessarily about book bans, this post reveals how a scandal put Rutgers on the map of ugly censorship cases. Read about this Rutgers-related censorship story as told by Megan Lotts.
• What is Samizdat? That’s probably a word that most of the readers are not familiar with. Growing up reading Samizdat books and other underground publications, Judit H. Ward introduces the term with well-known examples. Have you read these books?
• The Library Book: Have you ever thought about books burning for any reason? Becky Diamond’s recommends the story of the fire that engulfed the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, consuming 400,000 books and damaging an additional 700,000 volumes.
• The Judy Blume Rest Area: A lesson in free speech and democracy: Written in between two Banned Books Weeks, this post celebrates a rather conspicuous landmark of the freedom to read in New Jersey.
• Big Ben Lying Down with Banned Books: Thanks to a British librarian friend, Judit H. Ward received photographs about the Big Ben Book Installation, which paid tribute to books banned for political reasons in July, 2021. The 42 meter replica of Big Ben was set up in Piccadilly Gardens, lying almost horizontal and covered in 20,000 copies of 160 books.

 

Banned Books Week in the library

On campus, we had displays and exhibits for several years; the largest one was set up in 2023 by Becky Diamond and Jamey Silverstein in the highly visible Recreational Reading area of Carr Library, featuring matching books and student posters that recommend them.