Challenges to books some find objectionable are at 'levels not seen in decades' and have prompted counter-efforts

One of the top 10 targets

"Book challenges and bans have reached levels not seen in decades, according to officials at the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship and other advocates for free expression," report Heather Hollingsworth and Hillel Italie of The Associated Press.

Yael Levin, a spokeswoman for No Left Turn in Education, a national group opposed to what it calls a "Leftist agenda" for public schools, told AP, "There are some books with pornography and pedophilia that should absolutely be removed from K-through-12 school libraries." 

AP mentions several efforts in states and localities, including a Tennessee school board's banning of Art Spiegelman's Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust; a Missouri school district's effort to remove such books as Gender Queer, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Keise Laymon's memoir Heavy." 

Such efforts have prompted counter-efforts, AP reports: "Two anti-banning initiatives were launched in Pennsylvania," AP reports. "In Kutztown, eighth grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh formed a banned book club last fall that began with a reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm. The Pennridge Improvement Project has started a drive to purchase books that have been removed from schools, including Leslea Newman's Heather has Two Mommies and Kim Johnson's This is My America, and place them in small free libraries around the district."

The AP story concludes with a pictorial list of the top 10 books people wanted removed from schools and libraries in 2020. They include Sherman Aexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, about a Native American teenager; Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck's novel about migrant farm workers in the Depression, which has been “banned and challenged for racial slurs and racist stereotypes,” showing that intolerance comes from both sides; and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which has caught similar flak.