America’s youth received profound messaging in 2024 regarding books and reading — don’t do it.
Don’t read the books that were banned in more than 10,000 instances of censorship during the 2023-2024 school year (up from 3,300 the year before), according to a report published last month by the literary advocacy nonprofit PEN America. The document is part of a three-year campaign to track the rise of book banning in America and presents the most startling results to date.
More than 4,000 unique titles, books that overwhelmingly “grapple with race and racism or explore gender identity and sexuality or depict sexual violence” faced bans this year. Classics such as Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” nestle among modern bestsellers in the top 20 banned books.
Popular novelist Jodi Picoult says her book “Nineteen Minutes” is the top banned book in the country not for portraying a school shooting, but because of “a single page that depicts date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body.” One topic that advocates and critics of banning cannot find middle ground on is the line between pornography and representation.
Nobody speaks to the dangers that debate can spark quite like 2020 Louisiana School Librarian of the Year Amanda Jones. The middle-school librarian chronicles how she was defamed as a pedophile after she spoke out against book banning in her memoir “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America” — included among The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s list of this year’s best Southern books.
Florida was the most prevalent book banner, having barred a whopping 4,500 books at roughly half its 70 school districts. In response, acclaimed novelist Lauren Groff, whose “The Vaster Wilds” was on the AJC’s list of best Southern books in 2023, has opened a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, called The Lynx highlighting challenged and banned books.
The battle over who decides what America’s children can read is intensifying. It will be interesting to see how Georgia’s new state law placing censorship powers in the hands of school principals, instead of librarians who are trained on inclusion and diversity, will affect the future of Southern storytelling.
For now it is in excellent form, judging from this selection of the 10 best Southern books of 2024, listed in order of publication.
Credit: Algonquin Books
Credit: Algonquin Books
“Old Crimes: And Other Stories”
Jill McCorkle was 26 years old when she made history by publishing two debut novels on the same day. Forty years later, the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee delivers her 12th published work brimming with deep introspections on Southern life. A compilation of 12 stand-alone narratives focused on the interior experiences of melancholy characters, this story collection coalesces into a stunning study on the shared experience of isolation. (Algonquin Books, $27)
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Percival Everett breathes new life into an American classic with this year’s National Book Award winner that retells Mark Twain’s 1885 classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” through the eyes of Huck’s enslaved travel companion, Jim. As the duo journeys along the Mississippi River on a harrowing adventure toward freedom, Everett’s Jim conceals his literacy from Huck while internally debating the institution of slavery with the philosopher Voltaire. Heralded by the National Book judges as a “surgical disarticulation of the bones that hold American racialism in place,” Everett’s narrative delivers a brilliant and redemptive contribution to the contemporary canon. (Doubleday, $28)
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
“The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony”
Florida restaurant critic Annabelle Tometich’s eccentric Filipina mother shot a BB gun at a man she caught stealing mangos from her beloved trees in 2015. Her mom’s arrest sent Tometich down a rabbit hole of self-discovery chronicled in her nonfiction debut. In this poignant and entertaining memoir, Tometich sifts through how her formative years spent in a violent, multiracial household in Florida impacted her lifelong search for a sense of belonging. (Little, Brown and Company, $30)
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Hearkening back to the true origins of the eponymous racial slur, Georgia author Taylor Brown’s sixth novel revisits the largest labor uprising in American history in his historical fiction about the Battle of Blair Mountain — the harrowing 1921 clash between Appalachian coal miners known as “rednecks” and the U.S. military. The narrative historically depicts men of many creeds and colors fighting side-by-side in this novel heralded by the AJC as a “propulsive work of historical fiction that vividly reimagines this stormy slice of history.” (St. Martin’s Press, $29)
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Opening with a young mother fantasizing about killing her child is a shocking way to begin a story about four generations of Southern Black women seeking to overcome inherited trauma. Yet that is precisely what Sarai Johnson’s searing debut does. Johnson holds little back in her depictions of the neglect and violence passed down in this rich story that drills into the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. That unflinching honesty is where the narrative shines and precisely why, according to the Los Angeles Times, “one can’t help but cheer when these women do manage to reach one another’s hearts.” This riveting portrait of four generations striving to free themselves from the past is a tough but ultimately redemptive family saga. (Harper, $30)
Credit: St. Martin's Press
Credit: St. Martin's Press
“A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy”
When ex-Christian fundamentalist and Florida native Tia Levings saw that the tradwife movement and extreme Christian views were going mainstream, she was inspired to pen The New York Times bestselling memoir that asserts her former religious community is aiming to “run our country the way they run their homes.” Forced to call her husband “lord” and submit to discipline spankings, Levings chronicles her dangerous journey to save herself and her children in this gripping narrative The Washington Post declares “tradwife fans need to read.” (St. Martin’s Press, $30)
Credit: Bloomsbury
Credit: Bloomsbury
“That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America”
Amanda Jones is a middle school librarian in rural Louisiana who has endured an ongoing campaign of death threats, hate mail and cyberbullying ever since she criticized book bans in a public meeting at her local community library. In response to being called a pedophile on social media, she has filed a defamation lawsuit and written this gripping true account of her ordeal. As she told the AJC prior to her appearance at the Decatur Book Festival in October, challenged books generally are “by authors or have characters from marginalized communities so … it sends a huge message to those members of our communities that they don’t belong, that they’re not welcome. And when books are challenged and banned, we’re leaving out whole sections of society’s stories …” (Bloomsbury, $29.99)
Credit: Grove
Credit: Grove
When a dying recluse with prophetic visions rescues an adolescent sex-trafficking victim desperate for liberation, Georgia author Jamie Quatro’s “Two Step Devil” embarks on an innovative and powerful exploration of life on the fringes. Playing with form as much as point-of-view, this blistering work of speculative fiction examines the dangerous intersection where religious zealotry and mental illness meet the perceptions of good and evil. (Grove Hardcover, $27)
Credit: Penguin Random House
Credit: Penguin Random House
“The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi”
The U.S. Dept. of Justice calls Emmett Till’s murder “one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in our country’s history,” but Mississippi native Wright Thompson reveals how little is known about the teenager’s 1955 lynching while visiting family from Chicago. Shocked to learn later in life that he grew up just 23 miles from the barn where Till was killed, the author goes into research mode learning everything he can about the gruesome act and making new discoveries along the way. Case in point: Two men were tried and acquitted for the murder, although they admitted guilt in a magazine article months later. But Thompson discovers eight men were involved. (Penguin Random House, $35)
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Considering the towering legacy of this civil rights hero, it’s fitting that David Greenberg’s definitive biography of John Lewis weighs in at 704 pages. There’s a lot to say. Greenberg interviewed 275 people and used never-before-seen documents from the FBI to paint this detailed portrait of the enigmatic lawmaker whose “sharpest weapon” was his “moral authority.” A foe of antisemitism, an early supporter of LGBTQ rights and a politician adept at creating bipartisan coalitions, Lewis was, writes Greenberg, “a symbol of charity over spite, gentleness over anger, compassion over discord, hope over fear.” He wasn’t perfect, though. Greenberg delves into Lewis’ contentious 1986 congressional race when he suggested opponent Julian Bond used illegal drugs. It was a rare misstep about which Lewis later expressed regret. (Simon & Schuster, $35)
-- Suzanne Van Atten contributed to this article.
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