In a time of growing censorship and reliance upon the internet for information, it’s best to keep your sanity by hitting the books. The banned books, specifically.
Starting off, we have the 1953 dystopian classic warning the dangers of censorship by Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451.”
Bradbury challenges the role of governments in media censorship, specifically literature, following a reality that deprives the greater public of knowledge through “firemen” that burn books other than those accepted by their totalitarian government.
Next, look into the further dangers of absolute government control of personal thought and identity, with one of the world’s most frequently banned books: “1984” by George Orwell.
Inspired by the rise of the Soviet Union in 1949, Orwell crafts a world run by “Big Brother”, which divides people into categories to force mindless compliance through stripping individual freedoms of thought and creativity.
From the sterile world of Orwell’s dystopian fiction, jump through the rabbit hole with Lewis Carrol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”!
Banned for its appeal to children through mystical fantasies of childhood defiance of authority, including the mentions of hallucinogenic “drug use” and unconventional expression of emotion, this fairytale is world renowned for its originality and vivid imagery, and is displayed through the famous 1951 Disney animated film.
After you explore Wonderland, take a trip to Panem, the fictional dystopia featured in “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. The trilogy also includes “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay” as well as the prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”. Collins has most recently written “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” soon to be released in March of this year and adapted into film in the winter of 2026.
For its appeal to teenagers through love-triangles, and the premise of a national “award show” elevated drastically by survival and murder, this dystopian series has been banned for romance, and its suggestions of revolution and defiance under a corrupt government.
For a more historically realistic read, journey to the 1930s in Maycomb, Ala., where a young girl learns the importance of community and fighting for justice in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Lee tells the story of Scout and her coming-of-age in a community that held many prejudices over people of color and people with disabilities. When her father took on a case to defend a black man falsely accused of a crime, Scout learns the importance of sticking up for what is right even when it is socially unacceptable. This has been banned due to its encouragement to fight racism, particularly in southern US states. This is an American classic, and is used in the PV curriculum because of its powerful messages.
Continue with racial justice and coming-of-age with “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, touching on cultural growth, self-acceptance, abuse, sexuality, and the strength of positive relationships.
This novel was banned in Iowa for “explicit sexual acts”, when it truly brings awareness to genrational trauma that sprouts from cycles of abuse. Walker brings light to the discovery of oneself through her character Celie, an African American woman living in the southern US, who overcomes racial and sexual bigotry, testing the strength of her devotion to religion and self.
If you are interested in the nonfiction genre, a more light-hearted novel such as Katherine Stockett’s “The Help,” may be more your style.
Meet the many African American maids for White families of Jackson Mississippi, and follow their journey to justice through a humorous story about investigative journalism. This book is highly acclaimed and a part of optional readings in many Iowa public school curricula for its readability and honest exposure of systematic racism that has followed the ending of slavery.
The more modern “Parable of The Sower” by Octavia E. Butler addresses the issues of racism and classism seen in The Help, while setting readers in a post-apocalyptic Earth destroyed by climate change .
The current relevance of “Parable of the Sower’s” setting is alarming, being set in Los Angeles in the year 2024. This post-apocalyptic city is full of neighborhoods that have blocked each other off with walls. Outside upper-class communities, desperately poor and starving people struggle to survive, living in anarchy. Butler’s works have been widely banned from female prisons for their suggestive defiance and unity against society.
Next up, enter a frightening alternate reality by reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood: about a country disallowing female rights, supported by rape culture, and takes advantage of the uneducated and unrepresented- which have forcibly been made to be women.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” comes highly recommended in recent months due to fears of corrupt coverage of the Trump administration’s actions regarding the U.S. Constitution, as a parallel appears in Atwood’s novel, in which the fictional government erased previously stated laws supporting expression, free speech, individuality and legal rights of women and minorities.
Many PV students are aware of the recent removal of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” from high school curriculum, but are unaware of the importance of its message.
Taking place on a farm that has overtaken human ownership, animals lead one another in a originally just way, but eventually are consumed by the greed that power ensues. Orwell’s story warns people to be aware of their thought patterns under corrupt leadership, encouraging people to recognize patterns of manipulation- particularly those noted in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Overall, books may be banned for a multitude of reasons, and as these synopsis show, it’s usually because of their underlying messages, and the discomfort that such messages provide to authority. Take your rights to read and learn seriously, because characters in many of these books can not, and pick up a banned book!
