LOMPOC, CA, October 3, 2025 – Read a banned book and help celebrate how lucky every Californian is to have free and open access to information and ideas.
October 5-11 is Banned Books Week, an annual reminder of how censorship divides us and how libraries bring us together.
Efforts to censor books in schools and libraries have been around for a long time. Among books sought to be banned are Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, The Kite Runner and the Goosebumps and Harry Potter series. In 2024, 2,452 individual book titles were challenged in the United States. That is considerably more than the annual average of 273 between 2001-2020.