📖Banned Books Week October 5–11, 2025 📖

📚 Banned Books Week October 5-11, 2025 📚

🏫 "Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights." 🏫

Just days before Banned Books Week begins, Raoul Peck's new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 opened in theaters. It's a searing portrait of George Orwell's life and legacy, tracing how 1984 emerged from a world carved into zones of control - and how Orwell's warnings about authoritarianism, doublespeak, and the erasure of truth still echo today.

Peck quotes Orwell's 1946 essay Why I Write: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

That line could just as easily introduce Banned Books Week. Since 2021, nearly 23,000 books have been banned in American schools and libraries, according to PEN America - a number unmatched in modern history. To ban a book is to silence a voice, erase a story, and deny society its own reflection.

This year's Banned Books Week theme, "Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights," isn't just a clever nod to Orwell. It's a reminder that the right to read is a First Amendment freedom. Reading is how we defend democracy against fear, silence, and erasure.

Now imagine William Shakespeare stepping into 2025, fresh from watching Orwell: 2+2=5 and hearing that schools and libraries are striking books from their shelves - not with fire, but with quiet decree - would appall him, though not surprise him. In his own time, books and plays were licensed, censored, and sometimes banned outright. Richard II, for example, had its famous “deposition scene” cut from early printed editions during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, for fear that a monarch’s downfall would echo too closely her own precarious rule. The Master of the Revels (gatekeepers, aka today’s school boards) could cut scenes or deny performance entirely.

Which is why, upon discovering this new custom called Banned Books Week, one suspects the Bard would do what he always did: pick up his quill to set the record straight (-:

📜 Willy's "1984" Sonnet for Banned Books Week 📜

(ABAB CDCD EFEF GG – A Sonnet Pattern Primer)

ABAB

When truth is trimmed to fit the party's will, (A)

And books are banned in silence, not in flame, (B)

When stories fade beneath the censor's chill, (A)

And authors lose their voices, face, and name- (B)

CDCD

Then readers rise, like Winston in the night, (C)

To seek the words that power tries to hide. (D)

Each banned idea becomes a spark of light, (C)

Each page defies the censor and their pride. (D)

EFEF

They claim that "two plus two" must equal "five," (E)

That love is sin, that thought must be controlled. (F)

Yet books, like truth, endure and still survive- (E)

Their ink resists what fear would try to mold. (F)

GG

So read, rebel, let silence be undone: (G)

The quill strikes back when tyrants fear the sun. (G)