Banned Books Week wants you to think about the future

October is about to begin and along with the traditional spooky season festivities, something even scarier approaches; Banned Books Week,which runs from Oct.5-11 this year.

The annual celebration of our freedom to read has grown to frighteningly factional levels these days with the urgent need to protect books and ideas now more than ever in danger. Fortunately, many folks are fighting the good fight on this front such as George Takei, famed Star Trek actor as well as an author, playwright and activist who is this year’s honorary chair of Banned Books Week this time around.

 To salute this iconic superstar, I decided to focus on banned titles that deal with the consequences of future times, books that are still under fire today and beginning to seem too close to an actual tomorrow:

Since the tagline for BBW in 2025 happens to be “Censorship is so 1984”, it only makes sense to start with the George Orwell classic.

The novel has been challenged in many countries for it’s depiction of authoritarian rule and most recently in the US was on a banned book list in Iowa(citing it for sexual content) which was thankfully struck down by the courts.

Orwell’s living nightmare of a world where even your imagination was under the control of a tyrannical government still holds a strong influence today as terms such as “Big Brother” and “Thought Police” are part of our quick reference guide to political overreach. It’s the kind of story that you would seriously prefer to stay on the page rather than leak out into our shared reality indeed:

The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins might seem like too recent an entry here but trust me, these books are being targeted by those who fear their influence.

In February of 2025, a school board in South Carolina held a vote to decide whether or not to ban the first book from a class discussing dystopian fiction (the end result was for keeping the book and offering an alternative choice for any student whose family had objections to that title). 

While most of the complaints about all of the books in this saga of children being forced to entertain the masses via a televised death match revolve around the violence and sexual content (of which there isn’t that much of), the one that stands out the most is anti-authoritarianism.

How interesting that the concept of young people questioning the rules of their society and banding together to rebel against oppression is very objectionable to many folks out there, even when no one side is exempt from criticism. It’s as if they’re afraid of being on the reckoning half of such an equation….:

Given the numerous legal challenges surrounding women’s reproductive rights of late, it’s not surprising that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has become both pop culturally relevant and a recent subject of censorship at school board meetings.

While it has had international challenges as well, states in our own country such as Florida, Texas and Oregon have been putting this harrowing narrative of a woman trapped by a viciously patriarchal society to become a baby breeder for the oppressive elites on lists of books to be kept away from students. 

Never mind the fact that this book not only has been adapted for a movie readily available for viewing but was turned into an award winning TV series that even the least tech savvy person can find and watch to learn what all the fuss it is about. Why fear something that is “only a novel” unless it has plenty to say regarding our current state of alarming affairs..:

The ultimate novel on this topic is ,of course, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. 

This portrayal of a world where a firefighter’s main duty is to burn books by order of the state has been challenged as recently as this year in Colorado where it was among other titles removed from school library shelves.

Thankfully it, along with the other disputed books, was restored by court order. The most particular objections to this science fiction classic focus on the language (the mildest of profanities are included) and violence yet what I truly suspect bothers certain parties quite a lot are the anti-intellectual goals of the authorities depicted here.

Suppression of deeper thought and shouting down rational discussions based upon true knowledge seems to be the 

dominant tactic of those who hate books for providing the basis for just such pushback against such self serving small mindedness. Bradbury adored libraries and if he was still with us, would first in line to protect them from being destroyed both from without and within our communities:

Banned Books Week starts this upcoming weekend and if you’d like to learn more about it, I have placed links in the second paragraph of this post to the official website for BBW there.

I know that there is so much to deal with right now when it comes to the state of the world right now yet all of that makes the fight to preserve our freedom to read freely more important these days. Do what you are able to do to encourage folks to protect our reading rights or at the very least, think about the future of reading and how it should be cherished for the readers both here and now as well as those awaiting their turn in the years to come.

Also, much thanks to George Takei for speaking out and standing up for the rights of others on his various social media platforms. His support for free expression is a beacon of hope to many of us worrying about the dark days ahead of us and taking some solace in the fact that we are not alone in wanting a better world for all: