Banned Books Week 2026 will run October 4 through 10, 2026. Libraries and schools plan events to highlight access to diverse literature. Community discussions, readings, and classroom activities will support open inquiry.
The American Library Association and a coalition of more than 25 free-expression groups organize it. This year’s theme is ‘Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read,’ which invites communities to discuss censorship and protect reading choices.
The final day, October 10, is billed as Let Freedom Read Day. It encourages people to take one concrete action to support access to reading for all.
Every fall, Southern California faces the same question. However, headlines describe thousands of bans during Banned Books Week 2026, while the local library still has the books. What does the list mean here?
California has written the freedom to read into law. However, the law is being tested in Orange County right now. National numbers, for Banned Books Week 2026, are worth reading closely rather than repeating.
Challenged, banned, restricted
The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom uses three words that get blurred together in coverage.
A challenge is an attempt. Someone, a parent, a pressure group, an elected official, asks a library or school to remove or limit a book. The book may or may not go anywhere.
A ban is the outcome where the library actually removes the book from its collection in response to that challenge, formal or informal.
A restriction sits in between. The book stays in the building but access shrinks: it gets moved to an adult section, pulled from the online catalog, tagged with a warning, or placed behind a parental permission requirement. The ALA counts those as censorship too, and California’s public library law now treats several of them as violations. More on that below.
The 2025 numbers
The ALA released its 2025 data in April 2026. Its office documented 4,235 unique titles challenged during 2025, the second-highest total it has ever recorded (the record, 4,240, was set in 2023). Those challenges came through 713 separate censorship attempts, 487 of which targeted books.
The more striking figure is what happened next. The ALA says 5,668 books were removed from libraries in 2025, about 66 percent of what was challenged, with another 920 restricted. The organization describes that as the highest number of titles censored in a single year and the highest success rate for challenges it has tracked since 1990.
Who is filing? According to the ALA, roughly 92 percent of 2025 challenges came from pressure groups, elected officials, or boards and administrators acting on those groups’ lists. Individual parents accounted for under 3 percent. About 40 percent of the challenged titles dealt with LGBTQ people or people of color.
The ALA’s most-challenged list for 2025 has 11 titles because of ties. Patricia McCormick’s “Sold” topped it, followed by Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer.” Two Sarah J. Maas fantasy novels, two Ellen Hopkins verse novels, Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s “Storm and Fury” round it out.
PEN America tracks school bans separately and by school year. Its most recent full report, published October 1, 2025, counted 6,870 school book bans in 2024-25 across 23 states and 87 districts, most of them in Florida, Texas and Tennessee. PEN’s definition is broader than the ALA’s: it counts a book as banned when access is removed or diminished, including books pulled pending review.
California does not appear in PEN’s state totals, and the California School Boards Association, summarizing that report, listed California among the states with no recorded school bans that year. Both PEN and the ALA say their counts are incomplete because they rely on news coverage and reports from library workers.
Two laws, one court case
Two California statutes explain why the state’s numbers look the way they do.
AB 1078, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 25, 2023, applies to public schools. It bars school boards from rejecting or removing instructional materials because they include the contributions or experiences of a racial, ethnic or LGBTQ group, and it lets the state superintendent buy textbooks for students and bill a district that refuses to provide them, according to the California Department of Education and CalMatters. The bill moved after the Temecula Valley Unified board rejected a social studies textbook in mid-2023 over a supplemental lesson on Harvey Milk; Newsom threatened to ship the books himself and the board reversed course.
AB 1825, the California Freedom to Read Act, took effect January 1, 2025 and applies to public libraries that receive state money. Each library jurisdiction had until January 1, 2026 to adopt a public, written collection development policy, which the California State Library collects. That policy cannot allow materials to be excluded or restricted because of the background or personal characteristics of an author or subject, because they present inclusive or diverse perspectives, or because they contain sexual content that does not meet the legal definition of obscenity. The law also protects library workers who refuse to pull a book before a formal review.
Huntington Beach is where that second law is being tested.
In 2023 the city council moved children’s books it deemed to contain sexual content, including titles on puberty and the human body, to a restricted area on the fourth floor of the Central Library and required parental permission for minors to access them. That October the council also approved a 21-member parent and guardian review board for new children’s material, though it was never seated.
Voters answered first. In a June 10, 2025 special election, Measure A repealed the review board and returned selection authority to library professionals, and Measure B required a public vote before the city could privatize library operations. Both passed with roughly 60 percent, according to Voice of OC and CBS Los Angeles.
The courts answered next. Residents, the group Alianza Translatinx and a former branch manager, represented by the ACLU of Southern California and others, sued in February 2025 under AB 1825. On September 5, 2025, Orange County Superior Court Judge Lindsey Martinez ruled that the restricted section violated the Freedom to Read Act and ordered the city to return the books, take down the signage, restore a teen section and drop the permission requirement. The council voted to appeal in October 2025. In April 2026 the judge ordered the city to pay roughly $1 million in the plaintiffs’ legal fees, and LAist reported that library advocates said the books still had not been fully returned while the appeal continued.
That is what a banned-books list means in this region. The state law exists, a city tested it, a judge applied it, and the case is still open.
Where the local libraries stand
The two big public systems closest to home have leaned the other direction.
The Los Angeles Public Library’s Banned Books Week page lists the October 4 to 10, 2026 dates and points to its Read Freely program, which gives anyone in the United States age 13 and up digital access to the ALA’s most-challenged titles through Libby.
Long Beach joined the national Books Unbanned program in 2025. The city council approved an agreement with Brooklyn Public Library on July 22, 2025, and the plan, as reported by the Long Beach Post and EdSource, was a free digital card for anyone 13 to 19 anywhere in the country, funded through a $100,000 Long Beach Public Library Foundation campaign and timed to launch around Banned Books Week 2025.
What a reader can do
Library boards, city councils and school boards all take public comment, and their agendas are posted ahead of time under state open-meeting law. Huntington Beach’s library policy was made and unmade at exactly those meetings.
A library’s collection development policy is now a public document in California. If you want to know how your library decides what to buy and how a request for reconsideration is handled, ask for it.
The ALA’s Unite Against Book Bans campaign has a free toolkit and messaging guide for Banned Books Week 2026, and bannedbooksweek.org lists local programming. PEN America’s searchable index lets you look up any title, district or state.
And if a teenager you know lives somewhere on PEN’s list, the Long Beach and Los Angeles cards are a real answer, not a symbolic one.
Sources
- Banned Books Week Coalition: Banned Books Week | October 4-10, 2026
- American Library Association: ALA releases 2025 Most Challenged Books List (April 2026)
- ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom blog: American Library Association releases 2025 Most Challenged Books List
- ALA: Most Challenged Books (top 10 page)
- ALA: Censorship by the Numbers: Banned Books Data
- ALA: State of America’s Libraries 2026
- PEN America: The Normalization of Book Banning (Oct. 1, 2025)
- PEN America: Latest report press release
- PEN America: Banned Books Week 2026
- California School Boards Association blog: The state of book censorship in US schools (Oct. 28, 2025)
- California Department of Education: SPI-Sponsored Bill to Halt Book Bans Signed (2023)
- CalMatters: California pushing back on school book bans (Carolyn Jones, Sept. 2023)
- California State Library: California Freedom to Read Act
- Liebert Cassidy Whitmore: AB 1825 California Freedom to Read Act
- Office of Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi: Governor signs California Freedom to Read Act (Sept. 30, 2024)
- Voice of OC: Huntington Beach Special Election Results (Noah Biesiada, June 2025)
- CBS Los Angeles: Huntington Beach special election, library review board rejected
- LAist: Judge rules against Huntington Beach in latest battle over library ‘culture wars’ (Jill Replogle, Sept. 2025)
- LAist: Huntington Beach library battle continues: City to appeal (Oct. 27, 2025)
- LAist: Huntington Beach ordered to pay $1M in legal fees (April 28, 2026)
- Library Journal: City of Huntington Beach Ordered to Pay $1M in Freedom to Read Lawsuit (June 2, 2026)
- CBS Los Angeles: Huntington Beach ordered to remove youth-restricted section (Oct. 2025)
- Los Angeles Public Library: Banned Books Week
- Long Beach Post: Long Beach will open up its e-book library so teens from other states can read banned books (July 31, 2025)
- EdSource: Long Beach library joins effort to provide teens access to banned books (Aug. 7, 2025)
- Unite Against Book Bans (ALA): Banned Books Week 2026
- Education Week: States Are Banning Book Bans. Will It Work? (Sarah Schwartz, Jan. 7, 2026)
