BookNet Canada Reports on “Borrowing Banned Books in Canada

In this blog series, we’re identifying books that are banned or controversial using the keywords that book publishers include in their ONIX book metadata. Like we explored in the first blog post in this series, there are nearly 2,000 ISBNs and 614 unique titles or book series that are identified as banned or challenged in their metadata keywords.

From this list, we identified the top 10 individual books and top 10 book series:

Individual titles

1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

5. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

6. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 🍁

7. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

8. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

9. Animal Farm by George Orwell

10. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Series titles

1. House of Night series by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast

2. The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

3. A Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle

4. Jasmine Toguchi series by Debbi Michiko Florence

5. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series by Alvin Schwartz

6. Cilla Lee-Jenkins series by Susan Tan

7. Aristotle and Dante series by Benjamin Alire Saenz

8. The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis

9. Maus series by Art Spiegelman

10. The Luck Uglies series by Paul Durham

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Altogether, loans of these banned books steadily increased 690% from July 2020 to June 2023, with the largest peaks from March 6-March 12, 2023 and April 17-April 23, 2023.

The total circulation of library loans in these Canadian libraries also increased steadily — 786% over this period. This can be for a number of reasons, but most likely due to the continued increasing number of Canadian libraries that report to LibraryData!

Learn Much More, Read the Complete Blog Post (about 1230 words, 12 Charts)