Let Freedom Read - Banned Books Week 2023

A memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father--a funeral home director, high school English teacher, and closeted homosexual.

"Step into the harrowing world of George Orwell's "1984," a prophetic and haunting vision of a totalitarian society where Big Brother watches your every move and individuality is crushed under the weight of oppressive surveillance. In this dystopian masterpiece, Orwell presents a chilling future where the Party controls every aspect of life, rewriting history and manipulating reality to maintain its iron grip on power. Meet Winston Smith, a low-ranking...

Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.

"It started when she was served a drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth -- and ultimately her life"--Amazon.com.

An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present day. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy Afghan youth and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of...

When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human.

"In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward...

Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and...

As a young man and a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the 1945 Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany, which reduced the once proudly beautiful city to rubble and claimed the lives of thousands of its citizens. For many years, Vonnegut tried to write about Dresden by the words would not come. When he did write about it, he combined his trademark humour, unfettered imagination, boundless humanity and keen sense of irony to create one of...