The ALA's 150: What Thirty-Five Years of Banned Books Actually Tell Us

By Andy — 2026-10-06 — Literary News

The American Library Association released a list of 150 most challenged books spanning 1990 to 2025. It's meant to mark the ALA's 150th anniversary. Noble enough. But what's actually interesting isn't which books made it—it's what the shape of the list reveals about who's doing the challenging, and why.

Start with the raw number: 4,235 unique titles faced challenges last year alone. That's the second-highest total ever recorded.

The 150 most challenged books break down like this: 20 adult classics, 8 graphic novels, 11 children's and middle-grade titles, 81 young adult novels, 10 romantasies (yes, that's become a category), 8 memoirs, plus a scattering of puberty guides, an anti-racist handbook, and oddities that seem to have wandered into the crosshairs by accident—two Rupi Kaur poetry collections, a ghost story anthology.

The dominance is staggering: young adult fiction accounts for more than half the list.

This matters because it tells you something about what censors actually fear. They're not after *To Kill a Mockingbird* because it questions American innocence, or *The Catcher in the Rye* because it mocks authority. Those books tick certain boxes: racial slurs, profanity, irreverence. Fine. Familiar territory. What's worth paying attention to is what's happened since 1990—particularly in the last decade.

Gender and sexual content now drives the vast majority of challenges in books aimed at young readers. Not gun violence. Not racial violence. Not mental illness or drugs or the immigrant experience. Gender and sexual content. Ellen Hopkins alone has fourteen titles on the list. Lauren Myracle has six. These writers didn't invent the problem—they named it. They wrote books where teenagers think about sex and identity the way teenagers actually do: messily, urgently, without neat conclusions.

Actually, that's not quite right—these aren't books about teenagers thinking about these things in the abstract. These are books where LGBTQ+ teenagers appear as fully human. Where gender identity isn't a plot twist but a character's lived reality. Where coming out isn't a salvation narrative but a thing that happens on a Tuesday.

Consider *And Tango Makes Three*, a children's picture book about two male penguins raising a chick. It's been challenged repeatedly. Or Jessica Love's *Julián Is a Mermaid*, where a kid wants to wear a mermaid costume. The stated offense is often something vague—"unsuitable," "confusing," "not age-appropriate"—but the pattern is clear enough. Representation itself is treated as a kind of grooming.

What's strange is how contemporary these challenges really are. Yaa Gyasi's *Homegoing* and Sara Gruen's *Water for Elephants* are recent enough to still be in paperback. Living authors are watching their work get pulled from shelves right now.

The other peculiar thing: romantasy—fantasy fiction with heavy romantic content, typically written for young women—has somehow become a flashpoint. Sarah J. Maas accounts for nine titles. Cassandra Clare's *Clockwork Princess* has drawn heat. These are books about magic and love and violence, sure. But they're books that treat female desire and pleasure as central to the narrative. And apparently that's alarming enough to merit organized challenge campaigns.

Graphic novels, too, have become a newer frontier. Eight made the list. Alison Bechdel's work is there. Craig Thompson's. The stated complaint is always about "illustrated bodies" being somehow more corrupting than written ones—as if the visual is inherently more dangerous. As if seeing what a body looks like in a drawing teaches a teenager something reading about it wouldn't.

What I keep coming back to is that censors seem to observe very little rhyme or reason. A memoir about surviving sexual violence gets challenged. So does a ghost story collection that has nothing to do with trauma or identity at all. A puberty guide—actual factual information about puberty—sits on the list next to literary fiction. The incoherence itself feels like the point. If you can get *Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen* pulled for cartoon baby nudity after forty years in print, you're not really trying to protect children from anything. You're trying to signal something else entirely.

The ALA tracks all this meticulously. The data is public. And every year the numbers climb. Whether that reflects a genuine increase in censorship attempts, better documentation, or some combination—well, that depends partly on who you ask. But the list exists. You can read it. You can buy any of these books right now if you want to know what's so alarming.

Source: "The full list of 150 most challenged books spans contemporary titles such as Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe and literary classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee." — PR Newswire / American Library Association