Listen to this episode and get a load more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/bannedbooks
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, sip language with a finger sticking out, all classy like.
It’s Banned Books Week! 5-11 October 2025, happy banned books w- – merry banned b- – doesn’t seem appropriate, does it. Wishing you an adjective Banned Books Week, and in today’s episode we’re talking about what it involves and why book bans matter.
You can find out more about it at BannedBooksWeek.org, and it is run by a coalition of organisations, many of which are US-based, including the American Library Association and Amnesty International USA; but it is an international event, for instance in the UK the Index on Censorship is partnering this year, because book bans are not just an American problem. But good gravy are they an American problem.
On with the show.
When I was eight, my cousin Helene lent me a copy of Deenie, my first encounter with a Judy Blume novel. It’s about the thirteen-year-old Deenie being diagnosed with scoliosis and going through treatment, and how it affects her life with her family and friends and at school. Sometimes she talks about touching her ‘special place’ to make herself feel good, and being eight, I didn’t know what that meant, I thought she liked rubbing her magic elbows or something.
I chased Deenie with as many other Judy Blume books I could get hold of - Tiger Eyes, Blubber, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Forever, many more - most of these I borrowed from my friend Liv and read in her bathroom when sleeping over at her house; not just because I was an insomniac kid, but also because Judy Blume was not welcome in my house, my mother didn’t allow the books. As an adult, I learned that it wasn’t just my mother who forbad Judy Blume: she’s one of the most banned authors in the United States, during my four-and-a-half decade lifespan, each of those titles that I have mentioned has been challenged on the grounds of containing content about puberty, or periods, or sex, or magic elbow-rubbing.
Those weren’t the reasons my mother didn’t allow them; she felt they weren’t edifying. She was always trying to encourage me to read historical novels set several hundred years ago, which I really didn’t like because they always seemed to be about fighting in the mud and so much sexual violence.
The only ban-worthy thing in a Judy Blume book as far as I’m concerned is Michael in Forever naming his penis Ralph - which, by the way, sorry for ruining your day, is a name Judy Blume’s father went by.
Up there with Judy Blume in the rankings of challenged and banned authors in the USA is Stephen King, and Toni Morrison - it’s a pretty great reading list, honestly - and the American Library Association’s data from 2024 tracked 821 challenges and the most challenged book that year was All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson with 39 challenges, in second place with 38 challenges was Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maya Kobabe and tied in third place were Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Three states, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, are responsible for 80% of the bans. And, of the challenges with known locations, 55% took place at public libraries and 38% at school libraries, so if you think all librarians do is stamp books and tell people to shush, you’re missing that they’re on the front line of the fight for free speech and against censorship.
IRIS MOGUL: I'm Iris Mogul. I'm a student; I just started at UC University California Santa Cruz, originally from Miami, Florida. And, I was given the honor of being Youth Honorary Chair for this year's Banned Books Week.
SAM HELMICK: My name is Sam Helmick, and I am the American Library Association's President. And that's H-E-L-M-I-C-K 'cause I get some fun iterations of that.
HZ: Oh yeah, what so you get?
SAM HELMICK: Hemlock and Heimlich, and Hemline a lot.
HZ: ‘Hemline’! I've had like Zaltzpans. I get a lot of things 'cause people panic when they see the z Iris. Do you get any novelty spellings of your name?
IRIS MOGUL: Well, I grew up in Miami, so it was always kind of pronounced with like a Spanish accent. So it'd be instead of Iris Mogul, something like Mo-GOOL. But I'm okay with that. Not a big deal.
HZ: Although it's always fun to talk about names, Iris and Sam aren’t here for that, but on behalf of Banned Books Week, which librarian and anti-censorship campaigner Judith Krug began 43 years ago, because of a spike at that time of challenges to books.
SAM HELMICK: So since 1982, the Office for Intellectual Freedom out of the American Library Association has sort of aggregated a top 10 list of books that have been reported to be challenged or banned in the United States. And this has been able to inform us of the conversations that are sort of happening both in good faith and I think sometimes to kinda, I don't know, maybe perchance dismantle instead of build in America's libraries.
And it's also a celebration of our freedom to read, to speak, to think, to assemble; all of those wonderful First Amendment practices that we have. And so banned books is really just a wonderful opportunity to have read ins and conversations, to really celebrate our, our right to read, but to recognize that that liberty does not defend itself.
HZ: Just to make it very clear for people: what are the implications of a book ban? in case they're like, "I don't see why this is such an issue," like, why is it?
IRIS MOGUL: Symbolically, what it means for a government to be able to tell you what information you can and can't consume: I think that's really dangerous. Also, just on a practical level: a lot of kids and students only read for school, you know, because they're so busy and preoccupied with other things. If you're not reading a book in a classroom, there's a good chance that a good amount of people won't be reading or discussing the books elsewhere. Plus I think it's also about access to resources, like a lot of these books you can still buy at bookstores, but if you can't get them at a library where it's free, that creates definitely a disparity.
SAM HELMICK: I think it also sort of suggests that ideas without action are dangerous and therefore should be regulated, and that there is an authority or regulating body that should get to do that on behalf of the public when none of us have forfeited our liberty in order for others to do that on our behalf.
HZ: I was wondering if you could speak about some of the numerical trends, like how many books are we talking? What does the graph look like over time since 1982?
SAM HELMICK: What we have noticed is that there's sort of ebbs and flows, right? So there was the Satanic scare of music in different forms of media in the 1980s, which is probably why, in some cases, the onset of Banned Books Week began in the middle of 1982. And then we sort of saw like a chill of like everybody sort of recognizing that we have always had power and fingerprints and voice in our libraries and can choose, and that our independent rights means our responsibility is to choose for ourselves but not our neighbor. And then you kind of got into some like purity politics in the corporate space with like the Reader's Advisory of Music and things like of that nature, you know, with Tipper Gore.
HZ: In 1985, Tipper Gore and a committee of other so-called 'Washington Wives' founded the Parents Music Resource Center, as a result of their efforts we got the Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics sticker on music containing lyrics considered too sexual, profane, violent or occulty to reach the ears of children without passing the sticker first.
SAM HELMICK: And then we kind of took a breath again. And so then we had the Patriot Act, and we had literally librarians in my lifetime who have been arrested for protecting the privacy of our patrons in the United States of America. And then we kind of took a pause again and I think what looks a little different this time is that those conversations have always been messy. But that's kind of where the magic of democracy happens. Now they're not really happening in good faith, and I think the true measure of actually dismantling the resources itself, emptying the shelves themselves, laying off library workers, not having these institutions available to the public who pay taxes for them, seems to be a through line, and I think that that's a completely different discourse, which is why we're seeing more book bans now than we probably did in the McCarthy age.
HZ: From 2021 on, the number of challenges to books and bans has risen at an alarming rate. The American Library Association states: “Last year, 2,452 unique titles were challenged, the third highest number ever documented by ALA and significantly exceeding the annual average of 273 unique titles over the period from 2001-2020.”
HZ: What is the actual procedure of when a ban comes into effect? What happens to the books?
SAM HELMICK: That's a great question. We've been trying to find that out in the different pockets of the nation, because these are still tax funded resources, right? And if a case is an injunction, that means we should pause, because the books still belong on the shelves because they're having their due process and their day in court, are we still holding onto them? And so, yeah, we constantly are asking the question: what happened to those tax funded resources? And how seriously are we taking the process to get it right the first time so we don't have to continue to have this chilling effect and reconciliation with case after case after case? Which in and of itself is part of the chilling effect.
HZ: The chilling effect was a new term to me, but it has been used in the American legal system since at least 1950, and kind of means to prevent the exercising of legal rights such as free speech by making it really difficult or dangerous, or potentially a legal nightmare.
SAM HELMICK: Often you'll see procedural details of a book staying off the shelf while its reconsideration committee is at work. But that too is a chilling effect, because if the book has not been deemed to be unfit for the space, but it has been removed, then essentially a ban even for a short period of time has taken shape, and that it is a barrier of access to information to others.
HZ: Iris, I'm not expecting you to represent all people of your age or all people who are younger than me, but do you have a sort of sense of how people, like your peers, what their awareness is and like what their response is to this kind of thing?
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah, I think that, like all things, like if it's not something that they feel directly impacting them, even though it does sometimes it's harder to pay attention to. But I definitely am around plenty of people my age that are mad – and confused, to be honest, because of just a lot of, I guess, misinformation and confusing rhetoric. But, I like to think that like reading has become cool again. So, I've definitely noticed that as I get older, and my peers get older too, that reading becomes more valued.
HZ: What kinds of things are books challenged or banned for? Broadly, sex and sexuality; violence; profane language; political views that can be objected to; offensive content about race. This decade though, the graph has soared upwards with challenges to content concerning race, social justice and queerness especially gender identity, reflective of how trans existence is being treated by many powerful entities as a political piggybank to be smashed, scattering the malignant currency inside.
SAM HELMICK: I've seen a pattern of like our most marginalized and often underrepresented communities, our BIPOC communities, our LGBTQIA+ communities are easy targets because they have less communities with support around them; there's less literature.
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah. I think content-wise, seems like a lot of books that kind of challenge the status quo, or uncover systemic oppressions, and anything that kind of challenges authority.
SAM HELMICK: And then I think ironically too we're starting to see like classics, because we're seeing special interest groups - about 72% of the challenges that were tracked last year came from special interest groups, and they're sort of recycling lists from ten, fifteen years ago, which kind of teaches us that censorship is just a hammer looking for a nail. And what's fascinating is that often, the names will change, but the tactics will remain.
What we're noticing is that it's folks from typically outside of the community, having a concern with a swath of materials, whether they do actually exist or not exist in the catalog. They'll provide a list which is sort of like a copy or a Xerox of lists that we've seen elsewhere. And then it will be almost like a sweeping or a carpet bombing of challenges, which overwhelm a system when the system really is predicated on the idea that a community has a role in this to read a book in its entirety, to really consider it in good faith, to really reconcile as a group of community representatives what we wish to do with this book.
And so what we're noticing is a tactic to essentially circumvent that or overwhelm that process. And it's always almost systemically followed by seeking to defund our publicly funded institutions that give us access to information opportunity. So it's a cultural dispute, but it's also a class dispute that's being sort of distracted from.
HZ: The number of challenges and bans of books is actually thought to be far higher than documented, because it can be too dangerous for library workers and teachers to report them.
SAM HELMICK: I actually have experienced that firsthand when I was president of the Iowa Library Association, which is a chapter of the American Library Association. More often than not, it was actually community members, caregivers, and parents who had helped develop the reading list for the curriculum that then saw the books that represented them and their families withdrawn or challenged. And they didn't know where to turn to help. And the educators in that space didn't reach out, in part probably because that's a really difficult walk and balance to maintain. So we have our library communities relying on us to be the firewall between pernicious policy and their right to read all of the time.
IRIS MOGUL: I can speak a little bit more from what I've seen in the classroom. So that has more to do with teachers and kind of experiencing my teacher's fear. In 11th grade, I was taking AP Lit, and my English teacher at the beginning of the year was giving us like a potential reading list, and I'm pretty sure it was Song of Solomon that was on the list that she was a little bit hesitant about. I mean, I have a million other stories like that, and I'm sure other students do too. Just, I don't blame the teachers at all. But it's definitely a tactic, fearmongering.
SAM HELMICK: In my personal experience, there have been like a lot of personal pushbacks and castigation and threats made to myself and library workers around the country that are really trying to safeguard your right to read as well as your privacy and your ability to access information in a free society. And so I think about the letters that I receive, the emails of folks that are just reaching out because they've been ostracized or isolated or harassed on social media and in person, or at their job, their livelihood, and even often their own safety has been put on the line.
HZ: Sometimes the problem is that the prohibition doesn’t name specific books.
SAM HELMICK: When laws are written in to remove books, but titles aren't added or actual, like concrete legal terminology, you have the threat of a chilling effect, because you might overcompensate because there's really no clear understanding of what is to be removed.
HZ: For the past four years, PEN America has been publishing annual reports studying book bans; the latest report landed just the other day, covering the period from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, in which they stated that:
One trend has remained constant throughout these four years: Many of these book bans are not due to decisions made in reconsideration policies and processes. Nor are they the direct result of legislation… For the 2024-2025 school year, vast numbers of the books removed from shelves – pending investigation and permanently banned – came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators, and educators.
SAM HELMICK: And Helen, when you see time and again, like this drive to defund, school, libraries, public libraries, academic institutions, then it's difficult, because I think library workers not only feel threatened and mischaracterized and castigated, but then they're also worried about the response to fighting for your right to read. I mean, despite the fact that the Library Bill of Rights tells us that it is a professional ethic to push back against censorship and abridgement as a core value of the profession, we worry about the consequences of that because there seems to be retaliation for fighting for your library communities in the terms of defunding and dismantling.
And so you have one of the most trusted faces of public government on the face of the planet that have always tried to be your thought partner and advocate, regardless of what your goal is, now being put into a position where they don't feel the safety to support and keep you welcome and well. And so reaching out to your library workers, reaching out to your authors and your publishers, even just write a note of encouragement, really does move the needle for us, because right now it does sort of feel like we're being punished for being practitioners of the First Amendment, and being practitioners of free people reading freely.
HZ: It's much easier to destroy something than construct something. And it's a lot easier to waste someone else's time than it is to do the jobs and also defend against that time-wasting but destructive behaviour.
SAM HELMICK: It's very difficult to gently tell somebody that, because we've all been there probably someplace in life. And then to have folks dismantling cherished institutions, cherished practices, the voices of others that represent our experiences, but others as well – it's very difficult to kind of try to find that common ground and bridge and remind them that for their own edification, for their own stories, we have to protect the right to read.
HZ: What would you recommend to people who want to be active in opposing book bans and censorship?
IRIS MOGUL: I think first and foremost, to read banned books: that's the easiest way to go. And to connect with people. I mean, in cities around the country, there are entities that are trying to organize people to defend the right to read. So, trying to find some of those in whatever city you're at. there definitely exist, these special interest groups who are trying to get books banned and challenged. But then, fortunately, there are plenty of really, really good organizations trying to fight that. Moms for Liberty has been on the news a lot but on the flipside, I know of two organizations in Miami, who kind of took that ironic name, to fight against censorship. I think they're called Moms for Libros. They're great. And then families against Book banning and a bunch of other,
SAM HELMICK: Absolutely. Unite against book bans.org is one of the largest networks of folks fighting censorship in the Western Hemisphere. We'd love to have anybody join us in the discussion there.
IRIS MOGUL: I know the NCAC has the right to read network and that connects different organizations fighting censorship from around the country.
HZ: The NCAC is the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Right To Read Network is lots of affiliated organisations fighting book bans in their local area. You can join an affiliate - you can even start one.
IRIS MOGUL: They say there's power in numbers. So when different local organizations can work together, I think that can be powerful, but also just working like on the local state level too.
SAM HELMICK: What I like about Unite Against Book Bans is that we have so many wonderful groups, including the ones that Iris mentioned, that have signed on and helped develop a toolkit. And that toolkit, a variety, has a variety of resources. One of them is like book resume. So if you're curious about a book that might be potentially challenged, you can read the reviews in the literary and educational merit on that book and have a more robust discussion if you've not encountered that title before.
But if you have five minutes, five hours or five days, it will talk to you about anything from writing a letter to the editor to preparing public comments at a board of trustees or city council meeting to actually running to be a board member or a council member yourself. Because when communities show up for their libraries, library communities seem to win.
HZ: One of Iris's forms of action at age 16 was to get people reading banned books.
IRIS MOGUL: I started a banned books club at the local independent bookstore in Miami, Books and Books – they do great work, check 'em out. I think it was the summer of 2023, so a little over two years ago. Originally I actually aimed to kind of gather young folks, but the people who seemed to have more time — I don't wanna say more interest, but more time — to come on Thursday nights and discuss and read banned books seemed to be, I mean a variety of ages, but we had a few high school English teachers, a couple retired professors. So it ended up being people all older than me. And they're still meeting today.
HZ: What kind of responses did people have in the club to the books that you were reading together?
IRIS MOGUL: So many. We definitely read like a variety of books. On my own time, I like to read nonfiction, so reading novels with them was definitely good for me, on a personal level. But unfortunately there is a huge list of books we had to choose from. So we read a couple different James Baldwin, I think we read two Toni Morrison. For the last meeting that I was in Miami for, we read Louise Erdrich The Roundhouse, and that was a great one. So, yeah, I mean, we definitely have some people who show up not liking the book as much, which is also fun.
HZ: That's standard book club, isn't it? Some people are not going to enjoy it.
IRIS MOGUL: There was always one beloved member who had a critique that no one else thought of, and great conversations.
HZ: Sam, do you have any particular favorites of the banned books you've read?
SAM HELMICK: I'm always hesitant to talk about a specific favourite title because then the argument becomes the merits of this title when the real argument is the right to even debate it, or the right to have robustly funded and resource libraries so that they can exist on the shelves so you and I can grab them, read them, and debate them. And so I think sometimes they're pointing us in a different direction, and I don't know if that's intellectual laziness or if it's literally because facts and figures don't have to matter, if feelings are what's going to run society. And my feelings should not be running society. I love manga and I love nonfiction, and we would never have books about kale if this was Sam's public library. And so when I walk through the stacks of the library, I'm actually relieved to see books that would not appeal to me, because it suggests to me that we have a very vibrant and active and engaged society, and a wealth of ideas and experiences and understandings that I will never reach in a single lifetime.
HZ: Do they ever challenge or ban a book where you think, "Alright, fair enough, Mein Kampf can go"?
SAM HELMICK: That's a great question too. So Director Forrest Spaulding of the Des Moines Public Library in Iowa actually wrote the Library Bill of Rights before it was adopted by the American Library Association, and it was for two really interesting reasons. The first was we have a large German population in Iowa, and we weren't being kind to them because of the World War. But then we also wouldn't put Mein Kampf on the shelves of the Des Moines Public Library because of its hideousness. However, we were sending our children off to Europe to fight against the evilness that was in that book without giving them the right or the context to be prepared for what they were headed to. And I think America came into the fight a little late because of our lack of exposure to what was really happening.
HZ: Forrest Spaulding was Director of the Des Moines Public Library in Iowa from 1917 to 1919 and again from 1927 to 1952. During the First World War, anti-German sentiment was rife in the state, with German books being burned, German classes being forbidden in schools, towns being renamed, sauerkraut being called ‘liberty cabbage’ and German measles ‘liberty measles’ - wow that’s really sticking it to Germany, claiming rubella for liberty.
Then in May 1918 came the Babel Proclamation, whereby the Governor of Iowa William L. Harding outlawed the use of all languages that weren’t English. Not just German, all of them, lest any non-English language be used for spreading German propaganda. People were physically attacked, phone calls were surveilled, German churches were set on fire, and a couple of Danish ones too because who needs accuracy when you have xenophobic rage?
With the end of the war, the Proclamation was repealed in December 1918, although the sentiments it had encoded did not disappear with the repeal, of course. During the 1920s and 1930s, US librarians did not typically campaign against censorship – but Forrest Spaulding was an advocate for free access to information, especially in view of the anti-Black racism he saw in the US, and book bannings and burnings happening there and abroad. In 1938 he wrote the Library Bill of Rights for Des Moines Public Library, but in 1939 the ALA endorsed it too and an amended version is still in use today, to emphasise libraries challenging censorship and the abridgement of free expression, and that where possible libraries should present all points of view. Even if that means stocking Mein Kampf. Back in 1940, when Spaulding was asked about that, he said, 'if more people had read Mein Kampf, some of Hitler's despotism might have been prevented.' In his opinion, it was more dangerous not to know about Hitler than to know about him.
SAM HELMICK: So the best disinfectant is sunlight. The presence of information is not its endorsement. It is education and information and understanding. And so he wrote the Library Bill of Rights after really reconciling with himself that not only were we not welcoming all populations and living up to our ideals, but perhaps we would've been better equipped if we'd had even the information that appalls us at our fingertips to understand that the world of ideas, even horrible ones, are going to continue to exist whether we encounter them and engage with them or not.
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah, I second that.
HZ: It seems like the challenges come from pretty conservative sources. Are there cases of challenges coming more from left wing?
SAM HELMICK: So what I've noticed is that internally we're having that reconciliation as a profession, whereas the endorsement of the idea seen by its presence, or is that simply giving the community information? So books on detransitioning, books on vaccination, and pushing back and forth on these topics, can be very personally traumatic and upsetting to catalog and have an existence in a public library. And again, though, if we don't have ideas that counter each other, we're not giving you the full spectrum of thought that is available in publishing and society at any given time on a topic. So when we're seeing this from, I think, a different political spot on the spectrum, some of it's like an internal reconciliation of living our values, even when it's absolutely difficult because the moral standing of free speech is that we would defend the speech that appalls us, because if we don't, there's not really a mechanism to defense speech at all.
HZ: Were there any of the banned books where you were like, “How on earth did they find something to object to in that? Like, Where's Waldo?” Incredible.
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah.
HZ: In the top 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s, Martin Hanford’s Where’s Waldo? as it is known in the USA, was number 87, one place below Howard Stern’s Private Parts, two places above Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume. Yes, I do mean the picture book where you search for the cartoon man in the red and white striped sweater in a busy drawing. The book was challenged because in one of those drawings, a beach scene full of people, one of the sunbathers is topless and the side of one breast is visible. Yep - you’ve got to be pretty hard up. This cartoon side-boob is less than two millimetres. I’ll say this for the outrage seekers: they are details-oriented in a way I have never managed.
SAM HELMICK: Well, I've always been blown away by the irony of Nineteen Eighty-Four. I absolutely always have been. And then, Friday Night Lights, where it's like high schoolers playing football. I like that it happened though, because I think it brought in a new audience of people who were like, "Wait, books that were literally about my middle American experience or my high school experience, or my sports ball experience?" I'm like, yeah, censorship is a hammer looking for a nail, my friends. And someday, you will be that nail too, unless we all decide that we're going to unite against book bans today.
HZ: I'm surprised The Hunger Games were so challenged. I'd have thought they would love it.
SAM HELMICK: Oh my!
HZ: Use it as a manual; lift the age limit…
IRIS MOGUL: I think that's exactly why it's banned.
HZ: Does being banned ever produce the Streisand effect and make a book more likely to be read? Because I think if they just put it in a boring cover, no kid's gonna take it out the library anyway. A famous case in Britain, and other places, for decades was Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is a pretty boring book if you're reading it because you think it's gonna be exciting – you'd be so disappointed.
SAM HELMICK: Oh, I absolutely think that you're right about that Streisand/forbidden fruit adage where we're kind of shining a spotlight on books that really do deserve some wonderful consideration and discourse and back and forth like Iris is discussing, but have kind of moved on in the annals of time as other wonderful titles have emerged. And so it's sort of fascinating to see books in the top 10 right now that were challenged when I was in high school 25 years ago, or even before then, that are obviously the AP lit list of the legislators when they were in high school as well. Ironically.
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah.
HZ: Do books ever get unbanned?
SAM HELMICK: I absolutely think so. We have a couple of states now in the nation that have passed a right to read bill that protects the rights of our patrons, the rights of our library workers, the rights of our publishers and authors. I also think that when we ask questions, which is really what we do well as reference librarians, to really get to the heart of a matter, sometimes we can effect change. The state of Iowa Senate file 496, which is essentially the book ban for school libraries in the state of Iowa, is in its second injunction – it had been kicked up to the eighth circuit and is now in its second injunction – simply because somebody thought to write a letter of inquiry asking the director of education: how will this work? Because the law doesn't take account about twelve different factors that exist in Iowa school libraries. And so Penguin Random House and the five largest publishers of the nation picked that up out of the Des Moines Register, and now they've been working on that case. And so I think, again, when we show up, we do win. But it's almost like resistance. You just have to kind of keep at it.
I'm deeply nervous about the raising of the temperature when it comes to political discourse and the raising of the temperature when it comes to assuming the motivations of others, but also like the kind of laziness in coming up with solutions. And so I think that one of the lessons that I'm learning is that we have to continue to lean into the discomfort and we have to assume good intent. And when that is proven to be there, we need to celebrate it. And when we can find that common ground, we need to plant our flags in it. But I do think that right now we're kind of weaponizing this concept of… [Sam sighs] disagreement, right? Our love of literature, our love of reading is on the line; but probably also just freedoms itself, including speech assembly, thought, belief, disbelief. So I really applaud folks like Iris for continuing to be First Amendment practitioners, because that's journalism and that's librarianship, but that's also reading and building community.
IRIS MOGUL: I guess I'm aiming this towards younger people – I mean anyone, but especially people my age and in school right now: just to maybe push against the hesitation to read for pleasure or outside of school. Because, again, I know everyone is busy and has a lot of things to worry about, but, it's really powerful to be able to pick up a book and almost have a conversation with yourself, and not rely on a group of people in a classroom or a teacher to learn; you can do that all yourself.
SAM HELMICK: One of the easiest ways to champion for your own rights to read is to get a library card today and to use it this week, next week, and the week after that, and then to maybe challenge yourself by reading something outside of your own comfort zone. I think this equips us better to have conversations and reconcile that we have differences of opinions, but we can still lean together and be neighbours and thought partners in a library space. But then additionally, I think that it helps us build like an empathy and understanding that the world of ideas is not the representation or the endorsement of them from a library. It's simply strengthening your own assemblage of a philosophy, which is yours to make.
IRIS MOGUL: I agree with all of that. And I think that maybe having conversations about particular books that have been banned, as part of a whole conversation, can be valuable because it might be a reminder of what's being lost through book bans. And I just think like it helps people connect. You know, a lot of people have an experience reading a book and really being impacted and even transformed. So I think, in that way, like focusing on a specific title as part of a larger conversation can be a good topic.
SAM HELMICK: Iris, I think this is why the world's orchestra needs all of its instruments, right? Because I feel like the way you say things is gonna hit differently than the way that I can present things and the way that Helen is asking us questions to even make us think about things differently and more deeply, it's like it all works together, right? Which is why we all have to show up for libraries in our right to read, because it means something more when it comes from you in a way that I could never, I could never reach.
IRIS MOGUL: Yeah, and vice versa.
SAM HELMICK: Yeah.
HZ: We heard from Iris Mogul and Sam Helmick. Iris Mogul is a student, and Youth Honorary Chair for Banned Books Week 2025. And Sam Helmick is the president of the American Library Association and the former president of the Iowa Library Association. There are lots of links to Banned Books Week information and other topics that came up during this episode, at theallusionist.org/bannedbooks.
I wish you a righteous and impassioned Banned Books Week and beyond.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
quintain, noun, historical: a post set up as a mark in tilting with a lance, typically with a pivoted sandbag attached to strike an inexpert tilter.
Try using quintain in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by the singer and composer Martin Austwick; you can find his songs at palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Charisse Barnachea, and to Liv for the Judy Blume books circa 1989.
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