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The new year is upon us, and what better way to ring in the first days of the year–one which land at the end of a week, meaning that the “real” new working year is still a few days off–than to reflect on 2025? It was a busy year in book censorship.
As we gear up for another year of the fight for our rights, here’s your regular reminder that no one is coming to save us. We are the ones who need to keep putting the work in day in and day out for our right to read, as well as rights that protect us from public institutions of democracy becoming government mouthpieces. Next week, you’ll get a giant list of small tasks for fighting for the right to read; spend the year doing what you can to contribute to combating book bans and preserving the jewels that are our public libraries and public schools.
To determine which posts were the most “popular,” I pulled the top 750 posts on Book Riot for the year and teased out those that were categorized as literary activism. It was far more interesting to examine these in conversation with one another than in isolation, so rather than simply listing the top posts, they will be organized around themes. This is a chance to provide links to those stories, as well as short updates on where those stories stand now in early January 2026.
Florida Book Bans and Legal Challenges
The most read post from 2025 was one from August, wherein the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida ruled in favor of plaintiffs in a lawsuit over book bans in the state. Judge Mendoza said none of the books in the lawsuit were obscene.
Since that story, the state has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. This is their initial brief in the appeal, much of which hinges on the decision made in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on Little vs. Llano County from earlier in the year. The state didn’t attempt to disprove Judge Mendoza’s declaration that none of the 23 titles named were obscene. Instead, they used examples from books that were not a subject of the lower court’s review. The state also misquotes their own law on page 22 of the brief, claiming that HB 1069 prohibits “sexually depictive content,” which it does not.
Too many people write off book censorship in Florida. That is unwise, and it is deeply troubling for two big reasons. First, Florida voters are deeply disenfranchised, and they’re gerrymandered; these are the tools that the right uses to hold onto power, since the general voting populace does not elect these people by majority freely.
Second, Florida serves as a blueprint for book censorship. What happens there spreads. This is precisely what is concerning about the state’s appeal in this case. Twenty other states have filed an Amicus Brief to the 11th Circuit in support of the state’s appeal. That is 20 other states eager to join in banning books from their citizens, thanks to Florida’s lead. That is 20 other states keen to make libraries their mouthpieces, rather than institutions that support the literary, informational, and intellectual interests of the entire community.
This wasn’t the only Florida story in the top literary activism posts for 2025. Similarly, this story of how the state threatened public schools and demanded they ban 55+ books without review captured attention. The directive came before the judge’s decision above, but it is fair to assume those books did not get returned to shelves.
Texas School Library Shutdown
With the passage of Texas’s Senate Bill 13, state legislators perpetuated their manufactured panic over the types of books available in schools and school libraries. For the New Braunfels Independent School District, implementation of SB 13 meant shutting down access to all of the middle and high school libraries in order to go through the material and remove items out of compliance. This meant students went without access to their libraries for a period of time at the beginning of the school year due to a conspiracy theory.
When the libraries reopened weeks later, 80+ books were pulled from the shelves.
State-Sanctioned Book Bans in Utah and South Carolina
All year long, I’ve kept track of the books being banned statewide in both Utah and South Carolina. These were also among the most-read literary activism pieces in 2025. This piece from February talked about Utah banning its 15th and 16th book topped the most read posts. As of the end of December, Utah has officially banned 19 books from all public schools statewide. Utah’s law requires books to be removed when three or more districts have banned a book. While there are 42 public school districts in Utah, just two districts account for nearly 80% of the books prohibited statewide: Davis School District and Washington School District.
In South Carolina, 10 more books were banned at one State Board of Education meeting this year, following what felt like a hopeful meeting where many of the committee members questioned why their job had become that of being book police. Since that May decision, no additional books have been banned in the state–at least not yet. The primary book banner in the state, whose challenges filed to the State Board of Education led to those bans, was informed she needed to bring her complaints to the local district. Her district, Beaufort County, has capitulated in some of them, creating restrictions on five of the titles.
Book Bans at the Department of Defense Education Activity Schools
The Department of Defense demanded the removal of nearly 600 books from its schools worldwide this year (that ban list includes one of my own books). It wasn’t just the books, though. The Department also demanded a crackdown on the curriculum in these institutions.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense, alongside several families impacted by the censorship. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, stating that the books pulled from the five schools represented by the plaintiffs needed to be returned to the shelves. Though the ruling only applied to five of the Department’s 161 schools globally, it sent a crucial message that such censorship was unconstitutional.
Take the time to read the stories of students at these schools pushing back against the demands.
The Dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The most frequently read stories of literary activism in 2025, taken as a whole, were about the gutting of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). On March 14, Trump issued an Executive Order targeting the funding of the IMLS, the only federal agency overseeing public libraries and museums. The Department of Government Efficiency gutted the IMLS on March 31 and quickly turned it into a propaganda machine for the administration. We saw their first major propaganda project — one that diverted money intended for libraries nationwide and redirected it elsewhere — with their Freedom Trucks project.
This story was cited in the lawsuit filed by 21 state attorneys general over the agency’s shuttering (Rhode Island vs. Trump). That was one of two lawsuits filed to revive the IMLS; the second came from the American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (ALA vs. Sonderling). The Rhode Island case resulted in a successful temporary injunction imposed in mid-May, with a final ruling in favor of the state attorneys general in November. The ALA case has not been quite as successful, although the reasons behind this are administrative rather than related to the case itself. It is still in progress.
The administration dealt the IMLS another blow when the President’s federal budget proposal defunded and sunset the agency for fiscal year 2026. One of the most widely read, shared, and engaged pieces of literary activism this year was a story about how we could still save the IMLS and its funding. People acted and responded, and both the House and Senate included funding for the IMLS in their markups of the 2026 budget.
Two complex pieces are remaining in this story. The first is that the IMLS is currently open and operational, and that the ruling in the Rhode Island case meant that all the grants the agency provided to libraries were reinstated. This comes with a significant caveat: the funding is only available through January, meaning that we still do not know what the IMLS budget will look like for the remainder of the year. We will likely find ourselves in the same position as the first government shutdown in October, with another shutdown, another fight, and another big question mark about the agency’s future.
You can read the entire timeline and impact of the attacks on the Institute of Museum and Library Services in this document that I’ve kept updated multiple times per week.
The Librarians Sees a Widespread Release
A story about one of the most harrowing documentaries that honestly depicts the realities of library work right now earned a spot atop your most read posts. It’s both an announcement about the film’s widespread release and a review.
Great news: The Librarians will begin streaming on PBS on February 9. Set up a time to watch it and/or check if there will be an in-person screening in your local area. Those in-person shows often include a panel afterward to talk with the cast, filmmakers, and other library advocates.
The Shuttering of BookLooks and Rise of Other Unprofessional Book Review Sites
Moms for Liberty closed down their book rating and review site in March. There were many questions about why, though the site’s reviews did not disappear but were subsumed by another big name in “parental rights”, Rated Books (who have been actively lying about the books they’re reviewing in a way that makes it pretty clear they’re going to be targeting adult romance books before long). You can get to know some of the other sites pretending to be about book reviews, all written by non-experts attempting to push partisan politics in cherry-picked book passages. Among them are Take Back the Classroom.
Keep your eyes peeled for Rated Books’s next project, too, called the National Book Rating Index. This idea was presented to the group by a librarian who is actively engaged at the national level in promoting intellectual freedom. Somehow, she’s able to square befriending a group that is actively trying to dismantle, defund, and damage public libraries and public schools with the work being done to protect those institutions.
This is why the long-held ideology that libraries are neutral is not only troubling but also actively harmful and dangerous. It comes from within the field itself.
A Statewide Reading Bowl Bans Books–and Teens Overturn the Ban
It’s not a “feel-good” story if it involves book censorship. However, this story is one that feels uplifting because it was young people who led the charge for change and succeeded in their efforts.
Eight books were banned from the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl, a voluntary statewide reading competition in Georgia. Among the books were, no joke, a book about book bans. Once this story ran and word got out about the bans, the committee overseeing the reading bowl decided to overturn their bans and reinstate all of the titles.
This wasn’t done just because. It was young people who not only brought the bans to the country’s attention. They were also the same people who got those bans overturned through advocacy and activism. You can get to know three of those teens in our interview with them, also among the most-read stories this year.
And here’s a fun update: two of the three teens from that interview have been named among the 20 under 20 by GLAAD for their LGBTQ+ advocacy. Check it out!
Bad Bills and Good Bills at the State and Local Level
Many of the top literary activism posts from the year include several stories about bad bills making their way through various states. These included how Ohio republicans changed how public libraries are funded in the state, which will do untold amounts of damage to some of the best libraries in the country. A small bright spot in this story is that 20 libraries in Ohio put funding measures on their fall ballots, and 18 of those measures passed. This is a huge reminder that it’s only the GOP that hates libraries; citizens vote in favor of them in overwhelming numbers.
Iowa attempted to rush a librarian criminalization bill this year. Although it passed through House subcommittees and was reworked as House File 521 later in the spring, it appears to have died in the House’s Education Committee. It would not be surprising to see this pop up in the next legislative session, especially as some of the state’s republicans are obsessed with a book banning story out of Sioux Center. A 13-year-old borrowed an adult book from the adult section of the library, and the parents believe the book should be banned. Yes, really.
Early in 2025, we saw an Idaho public library board achieve its ultimate wish: a designated area to store books they dislike and label as “adults only,” as well as an opportunity to ban over 140 titles that don’t align with the far-right’s political agenda. Things at the Community Library Network haven’t gotten better, either. They were excited to share that one of the state’s cooperative library sharing networks was being dissolved this summer. That means in one of the most rural parts of an already rural state, residents are unable to borrow books from libraries outside of the one for which they hold a card–a flagrant act of impeding access based entirely on political power. Per the Community Library Network’s board, “the CIN did not comply with Idaho statutes, and so legally the network could not continue.”
But bad bills weren’t the only stories of interest. So, too, were stories about the good bills. In particular, this piece from early 2025 about New Mexico’s efforts to pass an anti-book ban bill garnered a lot of attention. New Mexico is among the three states attempting to pass such bills in 2026; here’s the latest guide on how you can get involved there, in Pennsylvania, or in Massachusetts in trying to pass these laws this year.
What Else? Advocacy, Activism, and Education
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the most-read and shared pieces covering literary activism in 2025 is this: library lovers want to take action. People want to take action, and they are gearing up to do so. Nearly every story I covered about censorship on the ground included insight or experiences shared by grassroots activists who were doing all they could to spread the word.
That is why it isn’t surprising to see that readers wanted to know why, where, and how two authors had their school visit canceled over discussing their book about book bans. This story remains unresolved, though the authors were invited to speak about their book on the Ali Velshi Banned Book Club. You can watch that segment here.
Readers were furious to learn that Josephine County, Oregon, officials were attempting to evict their public library over $1 (and, as it turns out, far right partisan politics). The library was able to negotiate for a new lease, and one of the biggest instigators in the situation, Andreas Blech, resigned from his position last month, rather than face a recall election.
Advocates were eager to build their skills in critically reading press releases from an authoritarian government. It’s likely been beneficial all year long as more and more departments share propaganda, rather than news updates about the work they’re doing.
And finally, among the top posts was this guide to 56 small tasks for being proactive against book censorship. This is a fitting way to conclude this reflection and update on 2025’s most popular stories, as next week, there will be an updated and refreshed list for a year’s worth of small tasks you can undertake to help end book censorship.