It is an undeniable truth that books hold an immense amount of power, especially when their subject matter contains controversial topics such as questioning authority, ‘inappropriate’ content, or uncensored historical information. Throughout history, and in many parts of the world into the present day, governments and schools alike have banned certain books that they deem explicit, politically inappropriate, and subsequently a threat to the authority they seek to maintain, despite them often being beacons of truth, understanding, and acceptance. Here are some notable cases, and why it is important to read them.
The United States has recently been a hot topic of discussion in relation to the removal (read: banning) of books from school curricula under Trump’s increasingly right-wing leadership. Despite making the New York Times Bestseller List, Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys is banned in many schools across the US for featuring a transgender protagonist who, in an attempt to prove himself as a brujo to his traditional Latinx family, attempts to summon the spirit of his murdered cousin.
Similarly, and somewhat ironically, considering the tensions between the two countries, Russia recently banned over 250 English-language books containing LGBTQIA+ subject matter. In a world that is increasingly hostile towards transgender people, it is more important than ever to read books written by and about the transgender community, and to do so is to directly confront the inequalities created by attempting to silence voices.
While the US is very explicit in revealing books that are banned from school curricula, many countries are less blatant about revealing censorship. For example, in China during the Cultural Revolution, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were available to own and read; however, they were heavily edited in favour of the government and sometimes featured political cameos by Mao Zedong.
Despite these texts now being available in their original form, China still experiences some of the lowest levels of press freedom in the world, extending also to books. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, written during the Cultural Revolution, contains the biographies of the author’s mother and grandmother, as well as her own autobiography.
Chang movingly dedicates Wild Swans “To [her] mother and father, who did not live to see this book”. Wild Swans offers a personal insight into a part of history that is often overlooked by the British curriculum and is heavily censored by the CCP, and highlights the important part that banned books play in bringing these parts of history to the forefront of conversation.
Dorit Rabinyan’s Gader Haya details a semi-autobiographical star-crossed love story about a Palestinian artist and an Israeli Jew who fall in love while living in New York, but ultimately end their romance when they move back to Ramallah and Tel Aviv, respectively. The focus of a romantic relationship between these two characters ultimately resulted in the book being banned from schools in Israel.
Gader Haya serves as an important reminder amidst the ongoing genocide in Palestine of the optimism of peace. Reading about the lives of these characters highlights the humanity the media often overlooks in favour of focusing on the divide, and in doing so, Rabinyan gives these characters a voice that cannot be silenced by banning the book.
Although there are currently no books banned in the UK, this hasn’t always been the case. One of the most famous and widely publicised cases of a banned book was DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the subsequent trial to get it published fully and uncensored. The book was first published in 1928 and violated the Obscenity Law by centring on the love affair between an upper-class Lady and her working-class gardener, while she remained married to her husband.
Containing scenes that were considered extremely sexually graphic at the time, its subsequent publication in full stands as a testament to the problems of class divide and female oppression that so heavily influenced British society during this era, and arguably acts as a beacon of hope that books that are currently banned might not always be.
Banned books become banned books because they are the most likely to challenge your way of thinking and broaden your view of the world. We can learn a lot about the current political climate from seeing the type of content that people don’t want us to consume, and subsequently, we should seek these texts out and consume them avidly.
To quote the New York Public Library, “The way to fight ignorance is to read everything you can, to foster and strengthen your own sense of empathy”, because it is empathy and subsequent understanding that allows one to see beyond the narrow-minded attitudes that cause books to be banned, and makes us better as individuals and as a society as a whole.
Another article you may enjoy: https://thebadgeronline.com/2025/11/chloe-michelle-howarth/
