Top 10 Banned Books You Should Read at Least Once

Maybe it challenged a political system. Maybe it questioned religion. Maybe it confronted racism, sexuality, war, class, or the darker parts of human nature. Maybe someone simply decided that its ideas were too uncomfortable for certain readers.

Whatever the reason, censorship has often had an unintended consequence.

It makes people curious.

A banned book can become more than a book. It can become a conversation about who gets to decide what we are allowed to read, what ideas are considered dangerous, and whether protecting people from uncomfortable ideas is ever worth the cost of restricting access to them.

Book challenges remain a significant issue. According to the American Library Association, 4,235 unique titles were challenged in 2025, while 5,668 titles were documented as banned from libraries. The reasons included objections involving sexuality, LGBTQIA+ representation, race, racism, social justice, diversity, and political or religious viewpoints.

But this isn't an article telling you that every banned book is automatically a masterpiece.

It isn't.

Some are difficult. Some are disturbing. Some contain ideas that have aged badly. Others can be emotionally exhausting.

That's exactly why they are worth discussing.

Here are ten books that have faced censorship or significant challenges and that can offer something valuable to readers willing to approach them with an open mind.

1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is not an easy book.

It is a painful examination of race, beauty, identity, childhood, and the devastating consequences of growing up in a society that teaches some people that they are less valuable than others.

The novel follows Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who desperately wishes she had blue eyes because she has absorbed the belief that whiteness represents beauty.

Morrison doesn't offer comfortable answers.

Instead, she asks us to examine where our ideas about beauty come from and what happens when children internalize a culture's prejudices.

The book has repeatedly faced challenges, including objections to its sexual content and themes. It appeared among the American Library Association's most challenged books in 2024.

You don't read The Bluest Eye because it is comfortable.

You read it because sometimes literature needs to make us uncomfortable enough to see something we previously ignored.

2. 1984 by George Orwell

Few novels have become as closely associated with censorship and political control as George Orwell's 1984.

Published in 1949, the novel imagines a society in which the government monitors its citizens, manipulates information, rewrites history, and controls language.

The frightening part isn't simply that the government knows what people are doing.

It is that the government wants to control what people are capable of thinking.

Orwell's vision gave the world concepts that have become part of everyday political language, including Big Brother and thoughtcrime.

The novel has itself faced challenges and bans in different places and periods, creating an almost ironic relationship between the book and the subject it explores.

1984 remains worth reading because it forces us to ask an uncomfortable question:

What happens when controlling information becomes more important than discovering the truth?

3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale imagines a future in which women have lost control over their bodies, their careers, their finances, their relationships, and ultimately their freedom.

The protagonist, Offred, lives under the authoritarian regime of Gilead, where women are assigned roles according to a rigid social and religious hierarchy.

The novel is disturbing precisely because it doesn't present oppression as something that appears overnight.

Instead, it shows how freedoms can disappear gradually.

A rule changes here.

A right disappears there.

A restriction becomes normal.

Eventually, people are living inside a system they once might have considered impossible.

The book has faced numerous challenges and removals over the years, often involving its sexual content, political themes, religious viewpoints, and treatment of gender.

Reading it today is less about predicting the future than thinking carefully about how power works in the present.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century.

It is also one of the most frequently challenged.

The novel explores racism and injustice through the eyes of Scout Finch, a young girl growing up in the American South.

Her father, Atticus Finch, defends Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman.

The novel is far from perfect, and modern readers may debate its portrayal of race, morality, and the American South.

But that's part of what makes it valuable.

Great literature doesn't have to give us a perfect worldview.

Sometimes it gives us a starting point for examining our own.

5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

At first glance, The Perks of Being a Wallflower might seem like an unlikely candidate for a conversation about banned books.

It is, after all, a coming-of-age story.

But the novel deals openly with sexuality, drugs, mental health, trauma, abuse, friendship, and adolescence.

Those themes have made it a frequent target of challenges in schools and libraries.

In 2025, the American Library Association ranked it the second-most challenged book in the United States.

The reason to read it isn't simply because someone tried to restrict it.

The reason is that Chbosky captures something many teenagers experience but struggle to articulate: the strange period between childhood and adulthood when you are trying to figure out who you are while everyone around you seems to have an opinion about who you should become.

6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is deliberately unsettling.

Its protagonist, Alex, is violent, intelligent, charismatic, and deeply disturbing.

The novel explores violence, free will, morality, punishment, and the question of whether a person can truly be considered good if they have been forced to behave well.

That question is at the heart of the novel.

If you remove someone's ability to choose between good and evil, have you actually made them morally better?

Or have you simply taken away their humanity?

The book has been challenged and banned in various contexts because of its violence and sexual content.

It isn't an easy recommendation.

But if you're interested in morality, psychology, free will, and the relationship between individual choice and government power, it is difficult to ignore.

7. Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about identity, gender, sexuality, family, and self-discovery.

It has also become one of the most challenged books in the United States.

In 2025, the American Library Association ranked it third among the most challenged titles.

The controversy surrounding the book illustrates something important about modern censorship debates.

People don't only disagree about whether a book is good.

They disagree about who should have access to particular ideas, especially young readers.

You don't have to agree with every idea in Gender Queer to understand why it has become an important part of the contemporary discussion about identity, representation, and freedom to read.

Sometimes the value of a book comes from agreeing with it.

Sometimes the value comes from understanding someone whose experience is completely different from your own.

8. Looking for Alaska by John Green

John Green's Looking for Alaska is a coming-of-age novel about friendship, desire, grief, guilt, and the consequences of our choices.

It has also faced challenges because of its sexual content and other mature themes.

The novel appeared among the American Library Association's most challenged books in both 2024 and 2025.

What makes the book interesting isn't simply the controversy.

It is the way it portrays teenagers as complicated human beings.

Young people can be curious, reckless, compassionate, selfish, passionate, and confused all at once.

Perhaps that's uncomfortable.

But growing up is uncomfortable.

And literature that takes young people seriously doesn't always give them perfectly sanitized stories.

9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Alice Walker's The Color Purple is a powerful novel about racism, sexism, abuse, identity, sisterhood, and personal transformation.

The story follows Celie, a Black woman in the American South whose life is marked by poverty and abuse.

Yet the novel is ultimately about finding a voice.

Celie's transformation from someone who believes she has no power into someone capable of defining her own life is one of the most compelling aspects of the book.

It has faced challenges because of its language, sexual content, violence, and themes.

But removing difficult subjects from literature doesn't make those subjects disappear from the world.

Sometimes literature gives people a way to confront realities that are otherwise difficult to discuss.

10. Sold by Patricia McCormick

Patricia McCormick's Sold is a novel about a young Nepali girl who is trafficked into sexual exploitation.

It is difficult material.

It is also exactly the kind of subject that literature can bring into public consciousness.

The American Library Association ranked Sold as the most challenged book of 2025.

The book's subject matter is disturbing, but that doesn't necessarily make it something we should avoid discussing.

In fact, difficult stories can force us to recognize the existence of problems that are easy to ignore when they happen far away from us or to people whose lives we don't understand.

Reading Sold isn't about enjoying a comfortable story.

It is about witnessing a reality that many people would rather remain invisible.

The Point Isn't That Banned Books Are Always Right

There is a temptation to romanticize banned books.

Don't.

Being banned doesn't automatically make a book brilliant.

Being challenged doesn't automatically make a book morally correct.

And disagreeing with a book doesn't automatically make someone a censor.

The important distinction is what happens next.

Can people discuss the book?

Can adults make informed decisions about what they and their children read?

Can libraries provide different perspectives?

Can readers encounter ideas they dislike without demanding that everyone else lose access to them?

Those questions are much more interesting than simply asking whether a book is "good" or "bad."

Read the Books That Make You Think

The most valuable books aren't always the books that confirm what you already believe.

Sometimes they challenge you.

Sometimes they annoy you.

Sometimes they make you angry.

Sometimes they introduce you to a life so different from yours that you suddenly realize how narrow your own experience has been.

That's one of the reasons censorship deserves serious attention.

When a book disappears from a library shelf, the issue isn't only the book.

It is the possibility of encountering an idea you weren't expecting.

The American Library Association documented 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, making it the second-highest number recorded by the organization. It also reported that 40 percent of those challenged titles represented the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.

Those numbers should make readers pause.

Not because every challenged book deserves an automatic place in every classroom or library.

But because the freedom to read depends on having access to a wide range of stories and ideas.

You don't have to love every book.

You don't even have to finish every book.

But before deciding that nobody else should read one, perhaps we should read it ourselves.

Because sometimes the most important book on the shelf is the one that makes you uncomfortable enough to ask why it was there in the first place.

And sometimes, the book someone tried to silence is the book that teaches you how important it is to have a voice.