13 Timely Books to Read During Banned Books Week

Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous—THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become.

When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. Both Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm, gratefully accept, but the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out—setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged.

The true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist. At age 12, Augusten Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The harrowing and surprisingly funny account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Read the full review of RUNNING WITH SCISSORS.

A gripping collection of four novellas, including “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” the moving story of an unjustly imprisoned convict with a secret plan, and “The Body,” about four rambunctious young boys who plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.

Read the full review of DIFFERENT SEASONS.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, NATIVE SON tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on what it means to be black in America.

A luminous portrait of three generations of the Trueba family beginning with patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara. Their daughter Blanca’s love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.

Read the full review of THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS.

Okonkwo is a wealthy and fearless warrior in his village in Nigeria. THINGS FALL APART traces his fall from grace in the tribal world in which he lives, as well as his futile resistance to the devaluing of his culture by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

A single act of kindness catapults Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre: a city under the streets of London inhabited by monsters and saints, murderers and angels—a city of the people who have fallen between the cracks. A strange destiny awaits him down there, in the Neverwhere.

George has a secret: she knows she's a girl, even though everyone thinks she is a boy. When her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web, George really wants to play Charlotte, even though it’s a girl part. With the help of her best friend, Kelly, George comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte—but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.

Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, this graphic novel explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. This is a tale of security and discovery, of playfulness and tragedy, of a fall from grace and the origins of faith.

Rashad, a 16-year-old African American boy, is brutally beaten by a police officer while buying a bag of chips at a corner bodega. His white classmate Quinn witnesses the attack, perpetrated by the man who raised him after his father’s death. Both boys must grapple with the repercussions of the act of violence that leaves their school and their community simmering with tensions that threaten to explode.

Every weekend, young men fight each other barehanded in basements and parking lots across the country. Then, they go back to their white-collar jobs with blackened eyes and the sense that they can handle anything. FIGHT CLUB is the invention of dark, anarchic genius Tyler Durden, who seeks revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Toni Morrison audaciously transfigures the coming-of-age story as she follows Milkman Dead from his rust-belt city to the place of his family’s origins. SONG OF SOLOMON introduces an entire cast of strivers and seers, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.