Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bannedbooksweek, aggregated by home.social.
The stats are in... During Banned Books Week a small number of real people downloaded our free EPUB/PDF offerings. Thank you to those who may enjoy the books!
But 905 downloads were by Apple & Claude bots, plus a few other crawler bots.
Well, hmmm. Fuck that shit.
We'll always give away books to good homes, just ask. We won't be doing any more free-for-alls, even for #BBW. We'd rather not feed the plagiarism slop factories.
#noAI #fuckAI #aPoxOnAI
#bbw2026 #bannedbooksweek #bookstodon
Oh my god – Threads
Read More ... libraries | books | banned book list | read banned books | banned books week. #bannedbooksweek #bannedbooks #readbannedbooks #censorship #libraries.
It's officially #BannedBooksWeek with #Bookshoporg 💪
Thru Oct 18th, get 15% off these titles that ssssomeone had a conniption fit about! 👀
https://bookshop.org/lists/it-s-officially-banned-books-week
MAUS is always one I look for and always on these lists.
The first Sookie Stackhouse vampire novel surprised me, though. Really? Someone had issue with THAT one?? 😩
#BannedBooks #BookSale #Books #LiteraryBooks #BooksBooksBooks #Bookstagram #Writing #AdultFiction @bookstodon
#NativeAmericaCalling: #NativeAuthors and book sellers reflect on a record year for #BannedBooks
Thursday, October 8, 2026
" Native authors and book sellers reflect on a record year for banned books
The number of books dropped from school reading lists and public library shelves is the highest since the organization, PEN America, started keeping track.
Fueled mainly by conservative pressure groups and elected leaders at the school board and state legislative levels, the challenges to books target what opponents consider obscenity and themes that are too mature for younger readers. But books by Native writers that cover issues like race, social justice, and historical accounts that go against more patriotic portrayals are also caught up in the attempts to control what people can read.
Tune into Native America Calling to hear about the trends for removing books for public view."
Guests on Native America Calling:
#AllisonWaukau ( #Menominee and #Navajo ), member at large for the #AmericanIndianLibraryAssociation, a non-profit
#JoaquinMuñoz ( #PascuaYaqui Tribe), professor of Indigenous education at the University of British Columbia in Canada
#OdiaWoodKrueger ( #Métis ), educational consultant at Wood Krueger Initiatives, LLC, based in Minnesota
#CasandraHanson (Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs), owner of #SahaptinStories, a bookstore in Portland, Oregon
#NativeAmericanBooksellers #NativeAmericans
#IndigenousPeoplesDay
#IndigenousVoices #BannedBooksWeek #Librarians #NativeAmericanLibraries #LibrariesRule !
To Joy My Freedom by Tera W Hunter, and other scholarly works that focus on the movements of emancipated Black women "Postbellum" is what white supremacist use, today, to attempt to dismantle, and prevent future, progress in Black communities recognizing that their work is central to it's upkeep and development.
This is a book I've wanted since Keisha N. Blain created her graduate level reading list last year. I see my great-grandmother in this work.
#Bookstodon
There’s a big difference between choosing age-appropriate materials and treating the existence of LGBTQ+ people as inappropriate. A story about a gay character isn’t teaching a student to become gay.
For a young person questioning who they are, seeing themselves reflected in the pages of a book can mean everything.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/national-coming-out-day-you-cant-ban-who-we-are-be49d2f11f52
#LGBTQ #ComingOut #USPolitics #NationalComingOutDay #BannedBooksWeek
It's the last day of Banned Books Week 2026 and I am outraged. My kids found this book in our library! Rape, incest, threesomes, drunkenness and debauchery?
#BannedBooksWeek #TheDILF
Hey friends. Here's my #BannedBooksWeek selection of the day.
Subversive Habits. Dr. Shannen Dee Williams guides us on the history of Black Catholic nuns and the Black liberation struggle.
Also on my Bookshop.org wishlist.
Writing #AltText can be a challenge! A few days ago, one of our volunteers wrote alt text describing the yellow ribbon in the #BannedBooksWeek logo as resembling "the yellow police tape that police put up around places the public isn't allowed to go". Another volunteer disagrees, and says that the alt text should have described a book that's been gift-wrapped in ribbon. So, it's #poll time! Which interpretation is correct? Boosts welcome.
Last week was the twentieth anniversary of this local #Houston news clip that I posted to YouTube. I remembered when I noticed this is #bannedbooksweek.
For anyone who ever wished being Stupid was Painful: 🤦♂️
Saturday, Oct 10: See our previous post for information about #bannedbooksweek
The book of the day is now available.
https://smashed-rat-on-press.com/bbw2026/index.html#sat
#bookstodon #erotica #sff #bbw #bannedbooksweek2026 #books #ebooks #free #nsfw
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”*…
Detail from Dos Mujeres by Diego Rivera, 1914Writer and teacher Drew Calvert on the benefits of reading, and more particularly, on the danger of turning fiction into self-help…
… My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical).
Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.”
My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out.
The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.”…
[Calvert reviews the history of the tension between literature and self-help…]
… It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.
Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish…
… The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.
Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment.
But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits.
The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.
Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience: “Literature Is Not About You,” from @drwclvrt.bsky.social in @commonwealmagazine.org.
###
As we read on, we might note that today is the final day of the 2026 Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. – source
Sadly, the problem seems to be growing. In a report timed to coincide with BBW, PEN International detailed nearly 12,000 instances of book banning affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 U.S. school districts during the 2025–26 academic year, a record high since PEN began tracking literary censorship in American public schools in 2021. (And, of course, this is in addition to censorship in libraries, book stores, and elsewhere.) Texas (8,193 bans) vaulted past the prior “champion” Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 (a censorial state law that applies to “broad categories” of books) by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban. More on these bans here.
Lest we need a refresher on why this matters. the estimable Richard Ovenden reminds us that “there is no political power without power over the archive” (“Titles banned, data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation – Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world.”)
#ALA #AmericanLibraryAssociation #bannedBooks #BannedBooksWeek #censorship #culture #education #empathy #experience #history #literature #pen #selfHelp #society
More than 12,000 books were banned in U.S. public schools last year. From the books being challenged to the communities pushing back, explore the latest reporting on book bans and censorship: flipboard.com/topic/banned...
#LetBooksBe #BannedBooksWeek
Discover More in Banned Books ...
What are your favorite banned books? 📚
We have a feeling the @[email protected] community has some recommendations ready to go. Let’s push back against censorship by filling our shelves.
#LetBooksBe #BannedBooksWeek
Book Reflection in Glasses
Christian Nationalists: "Jane Eyre is pornography and should be banned from high schools."
Also Christian Nationalists: "Don't miss Pete Hegseth's live snuff film. The kids will love it!"
https://unprecedented.ghost.io/archive/jane-eyre-mandatory-in-china-contraband-in-texas/ #BannedBooksWeek
Friday, Oct 9: See our previous post for information about #bannedbooksweek
The book of the day is now available.
https://smashed-rat-on-press.com/bbw2026/index.html#fri
#bookstodon #erotica #sff #bbw #bannedbooksweek2026 #books #ebooks #free #nsfw
"Gegen das Verschwinden": Das am Englischen Seminar der Uni #Münster gegründete "Banned Books Network" gibt in den USA verbotenen Büchern eine Bühne
https://www.uni-muenster.de/Philologie/aktuelles/archiv/2026/gegen_das_verschwinden.shtml
#BannedBooks #BannedBooksWeek
Im Rahmen der #BannedBooksWeek wird heute (9.10.) der Dokumentarfilm "The Librarians" gezeigt, der die Bemühungen von Bibliothekar:innen im Kampf gegen Buchverbote in den USA begleitet. 16 Uhr, Stadtbücherei Münster. Infos & Anmeldung: uni.ms/y0owl @[email protected]
Christian Nationalists: "Jane Eyre is pornography and should be banned from high schools."
Also Christian Nationalists: "Don't miss Pete Hegseth's live snuff film. The kids will love it!" https://unprecedented.ghost.io/archive/jane-eyre-mandatory-in-china-contraband-in-texas/ #BannedBooksWeek
We are currently observing #BannedBooksWeek with a special opportunity. When members of the public (that means YOU!) buy #books for incarcerated people using any of the wish lists hosted for us by independent bookstores, a generous donor will provide a matching dollar-for-dollar donation. Our wish lists can be found through links on this page: https://linktr.ee/dcbtp
This special opportunity to help both incarcerated readers AND independent #bookstores ends October 10, 2026.
Apparently, @[email protected] is still scary. 👀📚
He’s once again the most banned author in America. Here's everything you need to know for #BannedBooksWeek, from @[email protected]'s list to @[email protected] on why silencing artists is backfiring.
flipboard.com/@thecultured...
It's Banned Books Week!
Apparently, @[email protected] is still scary. 👀📚
He’s once again the most banned author in America. Here's everything you need to know for #BannedBooksWeek, from @[email protected]'s list to @[email protected] on why silencing artists is backfiring.
flipboard.com/@thecultured...
It's Banned Books Week!
Thursday, Oct 8: See our previous post for information about #bannedbooksweek
The book of the day is now available.
https://smashed-rat-on-press.com/bbw2026/index.html#thu
#bookstodon #erotica #sff #bbw #bannedbooksweek2026 #books #ebooks #free #nsfw
Joining friends for #BannedBooksWeek! As a librarian, I know how ridiculous book bans are.
From my collection: Bicycling for Ladies (1896). Seems innocuous, right? But Victorians had opinions on what women should do.
The woman on this cover is riding alone, at night, fast, and wearing pants! In one illustration, she broke every social norm.
For #BannedBooksWeek we’re highlighting Reading Wars by Don Herzog 📚
From Reformation England to contemporary book bans, Herzog explores the long history of attempts to control who can read and what they can read, and what this reveals about equality and freedom.
🔗 https://bit.ly/4ue0C7w
Ok, friends! Your #BannedBooksWeek selection of the day! Another one from my bookshop.org wishlist (want)
In the wake of #RapeCulture #cornell 7 being at an all time high, let's talk about Black women with the audacity to have sexual and economic agency in an era when it was uncommon.
Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners
Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy by Lashawn Harris #BlackFedi #BlackLivesMatter #bookstodon
Whitby Gothic (@whitbygothic.bsky.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/whitbygothic.bsky.social/post/3mxcrseenr22p
On the history of #BannedBooksWeek
How 500 Books Locked in Cages Helped Launch Banned Books Week https://reactormag.com/500-books-locked-in-cages-banned-books-week
For #BannedBooksWeek I’m sharing some of the resources I’ve put together over the years. This one is on #Queer books that have been banned.
#lgbtq #BannedBooks #BookBans #reading #books
https://www.underground-bookshelf.com/resources/1207672_10-queer-books-that-have-been-banned
Sentinel: PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high. “Nearly 12,000 bans took place in public schools over the past year, according to a new study from PEN America, the highest total since the free expression organization began tracking removals five years ago. For the second straight year, Stephen King was the author most likely to have his work withdrawn. Many of […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/10/07/pen-america-nearly-12000-school-book-bans-in-a-year-a-record-high-sentinel/
Wednesday, Oct 7: See our previous post for information about #bannedbooksweek
The book of the day is now available.
https://smashed-rat-on-press.com/bbw2026/index.html#wed
#bookstodon #erotica #sff #bbw #bannedbooksweek2026 #books #ebooks #free #nsfw
4 - 10 October 2026 is Banned Books Week! Just last year, it was reported that a UK high school had banned nearly 200 books as "inappropriate", including Sir Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and Good Omens.
What are your favourite "banned" books? Which lesser-known "banned" books and authors should we be reading? Tell us about them in the replies!
#Discworld #DiscworldConvention #TerryPratchett #BannedBooksWeek
If the goal was to silence rapper Macklemore after he spoke out in support of Palestinians in Gaza, it clearly backfired.This pattern has a name: the Streisand effect. #BannedBooksWeek https://theconversation.com/whether-its-banning-books-or-preventing-macklemore-from-touring-silencing-artists-often-backfires-292654
