The most challenged books in American libraries 2024 to 2025

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom has published a list of the ten most challenged books every year since 2001, compiled from the reports libraries and schools send it, and the lists of the 2020s look nothing like those of the 2000s. Where Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn once led, the 2024 and 2025 lists are young adult fiction about sexuality, race and abuse: Patricia McCormick's Sold, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer at the top in 2025, with the ALA counting 4,235 distinct titles challenged that year, the second-highest number it has ever recorded. PEN America's separate count of school bans found 6,870 removals in the 2024 to 2025 school year.

Challenged books have always been collected, and the collecting logic is the usual one: the first printing of the first edition in its original jacket. For the recent titles that means small first printings that nobody kept, since most were bought by school and public libraries; a true first of Gender Queer (Lion Forge, 2019) or Sold (Hyperion, 2006) is scarcer than the sales figures suggest, and signed copies are the ones to look for. The older rows are the classics that keep returning to the lists, and here the firsts are serious books: The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) is the scarcest Toni Morrison first, The Handmaid's Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) is a four-figure book in its Canadian first, and The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003) in its first printing is worth many times a later one.

Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources, its points are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing.