Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Banned Books Week 2026 - Top 11 Most Challenged Books, Books 3 and 4
The 2025 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts continue to originate from organized movements. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents. (ALA)
Number of challenges: 25
Review Committee Recommendation - Gender Queer: A Memoir, Fairfax County Public Schools Statement of Support for Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, October 17, 2021
Author Statement
4. Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas
Number of challenges: 24
Monday, October 5, 2026
Banned Books Week 2026 - Top 11 Most Challenged Books, Books 1 and 2
The American Library Association documented 487 attempts to censor books at libraries, schools, and universities in 2025. The reasons most commonly cited for censorship were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ representation; covering topics of race, racism, social justice, and diversity; and presenting political or religious views with which the challengers disagreed. OIF tracked the 4,235 unique titles that were challenged or banned in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA. (ALA)
1. Sold by Patricia McCormick
Response To Challenges
“The message of strength and hope is important to teen girls who need to know that whatever they are facing, whether as bad as rape and continued sexual abuse or not, can be survived and that help is available. That this book was challenged is ridiculous.”
“There are so many important lessons to be learned from this book. I feel it is also important for our students to have access to books like this - they need to understand that some people live this life and that there is a way our of it. Please keep this book available for our students. I am a mother and ironically had recommended this book to my freshman daughter a week before the list of "challenged" books came out. I would not have a problem letting my daughter read this book.”
Deemed a “touching and compelling read that offered a historical and cultural perspective on a relevant global issue.”
Author Statement
To ban this book is to erase the young people around the world who are currently enslaved. To ban this book is a disservice to the women who shared their stories with me so the world could know about their plight. And to ban this book is disrespectful to the young readers who want to know about the world as it is – so they can make a difference.
But, perhaps most important, to ban this book is to take away a lifeline for readers who are experiencing abuse. These kids know what adults often don’t. Books aren’t the problem; they are part of the solution.
Response To Challenges
Author Statement
“This book is my love letter and wish for every kid who is struggling with identity, because at the time I was writing it, I was struggling with my own.”—Stephen Chbosky
“Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes out ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.”—Stephen Chbosky
I will cover books 3 and 4 tomorrow. In the meantime, spread the word. There are tons of graphics, etc. for sharing on the ALA site here to help get the word out, or you can share this post.
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Lacquer is a Thrilling Word by Barrie Cole - Review
Barrie Cole looks at life through a colorful lens and I love it. I knew upon reading her guest post (read it here) that her poetry and prose collection was going to be a myriad of things...fun, touching, and thought-provoking.
"To Do" does a fantastic job of summing up the every day in a woman's mind. Boy, did I see myself in this one. Though my sons are grown so I don't have that factor, I remember those days, and my mind still runs like that - a mile a minute. "I will cry about so many things and then I will pull myself together with a magic drawstring." Pretty much sums up what women do every. single. day.
"I Know What Happens When We Die" is a beautiful poem. Here is the last stanza:
And then slowly, like a sunset
a territory opens up. We walk into it.
It walks into us. And then, like kids
after school, we shout, I'm home
into the forever.
"Still" is another poem I see myself in. It illustrates how often we find ourselves less than. This..."And I think that if I keep making mistakes, maybe one day, I'll just stay very still because if I don't move at all, I won't make any mistakes, but I still won't be dead. I'll be a still life of myself" and the last line, "I'll try to convince myself again and again that a still life is still a life."
There are several poems about her dreams and they just capture the craziness of them. I have been having some very fantastical and strange dreams of late so I felt myself really relating to those poems. Of the four, "Paris" was my favorite.
"How Things Are" like "To Do" captures how we thought things would be and the reality of what they really are. In a sense, a big mess, yet it's sad to think of it this way because it really is an extraordinary life. This part..."And it's sad that this life feels like a flop especially because sometimes it's just too difficult to remember to put the wash in the dryer until the next day when the wet clothes have already begun to smell of mildew and of cat pee too even though there is not a cat, because some or all of the family members are allergic to cats, so who knows why the cat pee smell and Jesus Christ this life feels like a constant starting over, like a constant begging to have another chance and then getting one, getting another chance, even four or five or six chances, but then failing again..."
The last stand out for me (actually, the entire collection is a stand out) was "Son: Age Three." As a mom of two boys now in their mid-twenties, I was sobbing when I got to the end of this one. Just by writing this poem in the voice of her three year old son, she captures the essence of our children when they're young. It hit hard. When your kids get older, it's so difficult to think about how fast things went by. Remembering them when they were little like this is a blessing, and a curse, because we never feel like there was enough time.
I loved this collection. It's probably one of the most unique I've read and I know it will stay with me. I highly recommend it.
About the collection
Advance Praise
Poet Alison Luterman says, “To enter the pages of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is to walk inside the wild and wonderful, kaleidoscopically shape-shifting mind of Barrie Cole, appreciating an odd truth bomb here, a moment of delight or humor there, and now and again a totally unexpected light ray of divine wisdom shooting through a dusty stained-glass window that was somehow exported from an ancient Gothic cathedral to a grocery store in downtown Chicago. There are too many delightful lines to quote in a blurb, but let’s just say that she had me at “I am still a good person if I have had an unfortunate haircut, the kind where there are bangs of insanity, the kind wherein cutting more could not even begin to improve it, a haircut that makes purchasing a wig a genuine consideration and I am still a good person if I paid the bill late and I was too anxious to attend the party and too anxious to say hello to the neighbor and so pretended not to see her at all and this was no surprise, because I do this more often than I do not, but I am still good. Probably. ” I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.” –Alison Luterman, Author of In the Time of Great Fires and Hard Listening
Poet Alison Luterman says, “To enter the pages of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is to walk inside the wild and wonderful, kaleidoscopically shape-shifting mind of Barrie Cole, appreciating an odd truth bomb here, a moment of delight or humor there, and now and again a totally unexpected light ray of divine wisdom shooting through a dusty stained-glass window that was somehow exported from an ancient Gothic cathedral to a grocery store in downtown Chicago. There are too many delightful lines to quote in a blurb, but let’s just say that she had me at “I am still a good person if I have had an unfortunate haircut, the kind where there are bangs of insanity, the kind wherein cutting more could not even begin to improve it, a haircut that makes purchasing a wig a genuine consideration and I am still a good person if I paid the bill late and I was too anxious to attend the party and too anxious to say hello to the neighbor and so pretended not to see her at all and this was no surprise, because I do this more often than I do not, but I am still good. Probably. ” I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.” –Alison Luterman, Author of In the Time of Great Fires and Hard Listening
“Barrie Cole has long been placing imaginary jars atop imaginary hills. Her ambiguously concrete work layers childlike simplicity over seasoned melancholy to produce piercing, wondrous images of charming, discomfiting transformation. ” –Justin Hayford Chicago Reader
“Chicago’s short-order chef of language and empathy.” –Kerry Reid Ghost Light, Chicago Reader
Available at Finishing Line Press and on Amazon.
Barrie Cole is a critically acclaimed Chicago-based writer who has written more than 15 plays including Reality is an Activity, Capacity, Meaning is Tricky, Reverse Gossip, Elevator Tours and Fruit Tree Backpack along with numerous poems, essays, monologues and hybrid works. Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is her first book.
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Friday, September 25, 2026
Guest Post: Poet, Barrie Cole
By Barrie Cole
Once, a writer named Barrie Cole, who, even though she wrote poems, essays, short stories, performance monologues, and hybrid pieces, mostly identified as a playwright. She’d written more than 15 of them and that seemed like quite a few to just abandon ship on the role. It didn’t make sense.
In 2024, Barrie Cole was lucky enough to have two theater companies put on a festival with 5 of her plays. Seeing so much of her work at once, she was struck by how much the stuff of not only language, but poetry in particular appeared in them:
In Elevator Tours, Ruth and Will analyze Wallace Steven’s poem, “Of Mere Being.” In Fruit Tree Backpack, Ceil and Anna discuss Anna’s strong feelings about punctuation and metaphor. Later, Anna describes beaches as embarrassing graduate thesis projects and ellipses as stepping stones leading into the unknown. She talks about her failed relationship as an empty vending machine. In Capacity, Shelby and Vivian go on about their enthusiasm for abbreviations and decide they’d like even more words abbreviated. They are also utterly convinced that the best thing a person could ever turn into, were it possible, would be a Shimmering Aspen tree. In Meaning is Tricky, Clare and Mark discuss the concept of binge-watching the world.
This should not have been nearly as surprising as it was because in 2018, she wrote a play called Reality is an Activity, about two middle-aged women who decide to use what they deem poetic interventions to save the world from fascism. They have a dining room table with a removable leaf. The space without the leaf becomes, through the power of imagination, charged with strangeness and transformation. Early in the play, Miranda talks to Mr. Howard, about a tiny magnifying glass as a metaphor for a poem:
Miranda: “Oh, how I love tiny things! Once, I saw a photograph of a tiny magnifying glass and it was as small as the tip of a finger. It was resting on the palm of someone’s hand. I thought it was deliciously ironic that something so tiny could be used as a thing to make other things look larger. Do you enjoy when things are magnified, a leaf for example, or a word in a book? I do. I like to see things up close. And do you love tiny things too, Mr. Howard, yes or no? And do you think irony is fortifying in the same way iron is? I do. How about a paradox? Would you like one? And wouldn’t it be wonderful, Mr. Howard, if a roll could be sliced in the same way bread is sliced? The slices would be so incredibly tiny! I believe adorable, sliced rolls would be the best things since sliced bread. Don’t you agree? What a lucky hand to have had a tiny magnifying glass resting upon it. And isn’t it peculiar Mr. Howard that magnifying glasses cannot magnify themselves but only things other than themselves? What a generous sort of object!”
Okay, I’ll stop writing about myself in the third person now because I am who I am writing about. Sometimes, I find beginning in the third person a useful tool. It’s a trick to gain perspective through mild distancing. And then, after some time, I can allow myself to get nearer bit by bit and jump back into the first.
The truth is somewhere along the line, I must have rejected even the notion of identifying as a poet. So, I just snuck poetry into my plays and other writing wherever I could, like some kind of midnight graffiti artist. The idea of making poetry central to my life and work seemed radical, impossible, slightly embarrassing, and even a little reckless.
I wouldn’t let myself have poetry. I wouldn’t call myself a poet. It wasn’t rational. I was already in my 50s. The festival had received great reviews. We could explore remounting these plays. I could write another and another.
What’s funny is, I really thought there was a choice. There wasn’t. I understand now why nuns become nuns, why birdwatchers travel thousands of miles in the hopes of seeing a particular one, their favorite maybe, with a rainbow crown, turquoise speckled wings, and a mating call that sounds like laughing underwater.
And sometimes, I realized, just like a dog, a leash is placed around your neck, and you are taken. I was and I seem to be still on the walk. The genre of poetry itself seemed to become a miles-long salad bar meant for my fortification. I had no choice but to go with the all-you-could-eat poetry package. This was where meaning was, where what mattered most lived. The alternative was bound to lead to angst at best or a miserable depression at worst. I’d been depressed before. No thanks.
I had revised a great number of old poems, sometimes reworking them past recognition. I wrote dozens of new poems, read a zillion books, applied for residencies, went to one in Oregon, took so many online workshops that I thought about putting a bed in one of the squares on zoom so I could rest. Soon, I began submitting poems. I wrote “Lacquer is a Thrilling Word” to learn how to put together a book of poems. I did not think it would be accepted for publication for a very long time or perhaps ever. I made all kinds of mistakes. Still, the book is a celebration of language, imagination, experimental forms, images, and sensation. It’s a celebration of seeing and seeing is high-level caring.
The best poems can make the reader care about anything: garbage, a blade of grass, a speck of dust. Once, I looked at a bandaid as deeply as I could. I marveled at the tiny little air holes, the packaging with its hard to grasp red thread like a tail and a smile, the stretch of the elastic, the tiny little square of cotton like a pillow for a dragonfly. Then, I discovered the late Tony Hoagland’s poem “Bandage,” which made me care even more about bandaids and in his poem, the bandaid written about isn’t even new.
Wallace Steven’s wrote “Description is revelation.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
In his book Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyn’s writes, “When we pick up a poem for the first time we are in a wonderful paradox. We have our defenses, opinions, prejudices, yet we want them challenged and overthrown.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
In Ten Windows, Jane Hirschfield writes, “A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes again.
Some poets and lyrical writers I’ve been inspired by, influenced by, and recommend reading or eating at the poetic salad bar:
Mark Doty, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jason Shneiderman, Diane Seuss, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Mary Ruefle, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Toni Morrison, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Chen Chen, and many others.
A big thank you to Barrie for sharing her love of poetry.
Stay tuned for my review of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word next week.
Monday, August 17, 2026
Celebrating 17 years of True Book Addict!
I am over a week late posting this! So busy the past several weeks. Blogiversary date is August 5th.
Honestly, it still seems like yesterday! Time just flies by. My sons were still little when I started, 7 and 6. Now, they're 24 and 23!
Though I've slowed down a bit overall with blogging here, I still keep it going because it's such a worthwhile experience, and I do have special content during Banned Books Week, and other times as well. I branched out to running a full online reading community. My reading group on Goodreads, my horror blog, Castle Macabre (which celebrates 15 years today, August 16th), my readathon site, Seasons of Reading, and my reading community hub for the reading challenges I host, Gather Together and Read.
If you're new to my site, check down in the sidebar and you will see graphics linking to the moving parts of the reading community I mentioned above. (I've also linked them above.)
I have met so many wonderful people and made lifelong friends through this blogging journey. I wouldn't change a thing!
To everyone who has stuck with me since the beginning, and to those who came after, thank you for letting me share with you through the years.
To everyone who has stuck with me since the beginning, and to those who came after, thank you for letting me share with you through the years.
I look forward to many years to come.
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Classics Club #45
And the spin landed on #18...The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles to be finished by October 4.
I did not even get to my spin selection from last time, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, so it's on the list again. Hopefully, I will succeed this time.
What is the spin?
At your blog, before Sunday, August 16, create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain "to be read" on your Classics Club list.
This is your Spin List.
You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period.
On Sunday, May 17, we'll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by October 4, 2026.
For full details and to join in, visit the Classics Club blog here.
At your blog, before Sunday, August 16, create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain "to be read" on your Classics Club list.
This is your Spin List.
You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period.
On Sunday, May 17, we'll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by October 4, 2026.
For full details and to join in, visit the Classics Club blog here.
See my full Classics Club list here.
- The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs (3 plays), Aristophanes
- The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
- The Witch of Ravensworth, George Brewer
- The Plague, Albert Camus
- 2001: The Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
- The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Doll: The Lost Short Stories, Daphne DuMaurier
- A Mirror of Witches, Esther Forbes
- Grendel, John Gardner
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain Poet (Translator - Simon Armitage)
- King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green
- The House of Seven Gable, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
- Come Along With Me, Shirley Jackson
- Let me Tell You, Shirley Jackson
- The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
- The Monk, Matthew Lewis
The Theban Plays, SophoclesThe Oedipus Cycle, Sophocles*- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
- The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
*I found the above edition on my shelf. Same three plays. I had forgotten I had it. Better translation.
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