The Most Challenged Books of 2011

The American Library Association released their annual list of “most challenged” books this week. According to their report, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received 326 reports* of attempts to pull or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves across the country.

Here’s a list of the top 10 books.

A display of challenged or banned books in the Youth Services department at the Lansing Public Library in Lansing, Ill.

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r(series), by Lauren Myracle

2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4. My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Read the most commonly cited reasons for the books to be banned or restricted at the ALA’s Censorship Watch Blog. You can see a complete list of the top 100 titles banned in the ’00s at the American Library Association website.

TIME Magazine also covers the history of book-banning in America, including stories about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Harry Potter series, 1984 and The Satanic Verses, and others.

*A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness.

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ALA: State of America’s Libraries Report 2012