ALA Reports 4,235 Unique Books Challenged in 2025, Second-Highest Total on Record

The American Library Association revealed 4,235 unique titles were targeted for censorship in 2025, the second-highest number documented by the ALA in more than 30 years of tracking. Nine in 10 challenges in 2025 arose from activists and government officials, up from 72% in 2024.

The ALA’s annual list of most challenged books was led by Patricia McCormick’s Sold, a 2006 novel about sex trafficking in India.

Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower placed second, followed by Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer in third and Sarah J Maas’ Empire of Storms in fourth. Gender Queer was the most challenged title by would-be book banners for three consecutive years before slipping to third on the 2025 ALA list.

Kobabe, 36, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, wrote the book as a tender attempt to explain non-binary identity and the journey of sexual discovery to immediate family.

“Many of the people who challenged my book in the early years, when it was conservative parents speaking up at school in board meetings, would hold it up and say this book is inappropriate or it’s pornography and then they would proudly say: ‘I’ve never read it,’” Kobabe said.

PEN America counted more than 23,000 book bans over the past five years. A new PEN America report found that banned non-fiction books doubled over the last school year.

Twenty-nine percent of unique titles banned in public schools last year were nonfiction, and 52% of those nonfiction titles dealt with themes of activism and social movements. Malinda Lo, 51, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and immigrated to the US from China in 1978, published the novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club in 2021.

The book tells the story of a 17-year-old Chinese-American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in the 1950s.

“Sexuality is part of her story and leaving it out would be dishonest. I feel that art has a duty to tell the truth so I did so in this novel and I believe that the people who want to ban it are not necessarily reacting to the sexuality directly so much as they are trying to prevent young people from having the opportunity to see that possibilities exist in the world,” Lo said.

” Lo added that the trend alarms her given her own history.

“America is not China at this point but there have been so many attacks on the first amendment, including book bans, over the past several years it’s quite disturbing to me. I find it extremely alarming and I find it alarming that more people do not find it alarming. I fear that we are well on our way to authoritarianism,” she said.

Last month Luanne James, the top librarian in Rutherford County, Tennessee, was fired for refusing to move more than 130 books with LGBTQ+ themes to the system’s adult section. Sam Helmick, president of the ALA, said libraries were already feeling the grind but now to have them vilified has been incredibly demoralising. “Nobody wants to be attacked for serving the public; nobody deserves to be.

But the second is we know what’s at stake. This is a culture war but it’s also distracting us from a class war and if libraries fall in the United States, there’s a lot of social infrastructure that will collapse with it,” Helmick said. Kasey Meehan, the director of the Freedom to Read programme at PEN America, described how local tactics have scaled.

“We’ve seen the way in which those tactics have been adopted by governors and state legislatures and then adopted in language that is signed as state legislation. There’s several examples where some of these groups have stood side by side with elected leaders as they’ve proposed bills that would effectively censor certain kinds of books for kids in schools,” Meehan said.

” More than 5,000 writers have formed Authors Against Book Bans.

The group successfully passed legislation to protect libraries in Colorado, Oregon, and Rhode Island. The Guardian reported that literature featuring LGBTQ+ themes and people of colour remain the primary targets amid the coordinated campaigns.