Posted 12:31 p.m. Monday, Sept. 8, 2025
Wait... that book was banned?
The Student Engagement & Outreach team at Murphy Library would like to extend our thanks and gratitude to everyone in the UWL family and greater La Crosse community who visited our pop-up library table at Eagle Fest 2025.
Our engagement activity once again was the wildly popular Banned Book Emoji Game, where students were asked to guess the titles of banned books using only emojis and hints. We had 296 students and community members participate.
Students had the realization that a book they might have read in high school, browsed in a library, or heard about in popular culture, had been banned.
To learn more, check out the Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books: 2010-2019 list from the American Library Association (ALA).
Use this informational resource to research and investigate which of your favorite books have been banned.
Note that the ALA’s list is in no way comprehensive, meaning there are likely more books being challenged across the United States that just aren’t reported or documented.
Wikipedia provides readers with two resources on the subject.
“The most commonly challenged books in the United States“ details brief reasons for the challenges, as well as where those titles were ranked over the years, dating back to 1990.
A more exhaustive resource, “Book banning in the United States,” specifies the history of book challenges and censorship, including a background on how titles are “flagged” to be removed from libraries or school curricula across the United States. The resource also lists laws on censorship from state to state, the names of groups or organizations behind book challenges, and their reasons for attempting to censor books.
Check out the Collection Development Policy to learn more about how Murphy Library builds its robust assortment of academic resources for student learning at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Use the Search @UW feature on the Murphy Library website to find your favorite banned book in our library or borrow one you locate from any of our sister campus libraries in the University System, using our UW Resource Sharing service.
Recommend a banned book for us to add to our collection.