It is Banned Books Week from Sept. 27 until Oct. 3, and readers around the country are celebrating their favorite challenged books.
Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the American Library Association (ALA)’s annual list of the most frequently challenged library books–follow the links below to read these controversial books yourself.
Why are books banned? There are all kinds of reasons that people challenge books from being taught in schools and kept in circulation in the library system. Powell’s has a great list of the strangest reasons books have been banned.
Free Samples of the 10 Most Frequently Challenged Library Books of 2015
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon Books/Knopf Doubleday)
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston)
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster)
- Drama by Raina Telgemeier (Graphix/Scholastic)
- Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins)
- The Giver by Lois Lowry (HMH Books for Young Readers)
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (Vintage/Knopf Doubleday)
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Looking for Alaska by John Green (Dutton Books/Penguin Random House)