Brady Flanigan
Editor
This week, Oct. 5–11, the Shelbyville–Bedford County Public Library joined a tradition that’s 43 years old now, a nationwide celebration of literary disobedience. Banned Books Week. It’s the American Library Association’s annual observance, challenging censorship and offering readers at libraries across the nation the opportunity to check out a copy of the very titles that have been challenged or removed from classrooms and libraries over time.
Shelbyville-Bedford County Public Library’s display was modest, less than 25 books perhaps, and a 10-foot tall skeleton on top to honor some of the books most challenged in America—spooky titles ranging from The Catcher in the Rye or The Diary of Anne Frank to contemporary works like All Boys Aren’t Blue.
For added flair, the library gave away a pair of socks—covered in typewriter font with some of America’s most challenged works—to the person who’d read the most banned books. The prize is lighthearted, but its underlying symbolism isn’t.
Book challenges have been rising nationwide in recent years, according to the American Library Association. Many consider this a litmus test for the amount of cultural censorship and anti-pluralism circulating through society at the time. In 2024, the ALA documented more than 800 efforts to censor titles across the nation, fewer than before, but still among the highest numbers since tracking began in 1982.
Most of the contentious titles share one specific theme: they deal frankly with tough things like identity, race, sexuality, or adolescence. That’s to say, they’re often about self-discovery. Perhaps that is the quiet irony of banning books. It rarely works. The ALA ranks the Christian bible as one of the most banned books worldwide. Stories tend to find their way back to readers’ hands anyway, often with more curiosity than had it never been challenged.
That’s an important part of what Banned Books Week celebrates. Displays, posters, and socks—all part of a reminder that ideas, even bitter ones, are worth protecting.
So while Shelbyville-Bedford’s celebration may’ve ended with a free pair of socks, the real award is much more important: the freedom to think differently and challenge the zeitgeist—the right to read.