The Most Challenged Books of 2025: A Statistic Worth Reading Carefully
The statistic that ought to embarrass the most is not the total — 4,235 titles challenged in a single year — but the source. Only 2.7% of those challenges came from parents. Thirty-one percent came from elected officials; forty percent from board members or administrators. The image of a concerned mother clutching a banned book outside a school library is not entirely false, but it is not the engine of the current censorship wave. The engine is institutional, political, and rather better organised.
The American Library Association released its annual list of the most challenged books of 2025 on Monday, Right to Read Day — a designation that carries a weariness only slightly blunted by repetition. Patricia McCormick's Sold, a novel about child trafficking in South Asia published in 2006, tops the list. It is followed by Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which has appeared on these lists with the reliability of a returning migrant bird, and Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer: A Memoir, now a perennial target. Sarah J. Maas occupies two spots. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange makes an appearance, which would have surprised no one in 1971 and perhaps surprises fewer people than it should in 2026.
Forty percent of the challenged titles involve LGBTQ+ subjects or the experiences of people of colour. This is not incidental. The challenges are concentrated — overwhelmingly concentrated — on books that represent lives that somebody, somewhere in a position of authority, has decided do not belong in public or school libraries. The mechanism is formal: request a removal, attend a board meeting, pass a state law. The effect is more blunt: a child looks for a book and finds a gap where the book used to be.
The 2025 total is the second highest on record. The highest was 2023. The trend does not require dramatic interpretation. What it does require is the kind of attention that goes beyond an annual list — the patient, institutional kind that the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom and organisations like PEN America and the Authors Guild have been sustaining, with limited resources, for years. Meanwhile, Utah has now banned thirty-two titles in its schools, adding four more this month alone.
Somewhere, a librarian is fighting this with the weapons available to her: stocking the shelf again, documenting each challenge, sending the paperwork to the right people. The paperwork matters. History tends to notice who kept the records.
