Best Books I Read September 2026
Lots of banned books by female authors, plus two from Laos
The first week of October is Banned Books week, so this month I’m going to help you get a head start by reviewing banned books written by women that’ll give you some great choices to read to support it. Also, I’m in Laos right now, so you get a couple of books by female Lao authors. Enjoy!
Two books by female Laotian authors
A Year Without Home [YA memoir in verse] (2026) V.T. Bidania
Written in the voice of an 11-year-old Hmong girl living in Laos (based on the author’s older sister), this book describes life in a small mountain village where sometimes having to hide in the jungle is just taken for granted because war has been going on her whole life (the US’s Secret War in Laos). There are sweet poems about her simple family home made of bamboo, collecting peach seeds so she can have a tree of her own someday, and going to her all-ages one-room school. But then the US pulls out of Laos and the Communists take over, so she and her family and everyone in their village become refugees, and the poems become sadder. She and her family flee to the capital, Vientiane, cross the wide, rushing Mekong River, and end up for a year in a crowded refugee camp in Thailand, managing to survive and even laugh sometimes, but always hoping to go home someday. This book is based on the author’s true family history. Writing it in the voice of a young girl is very effective in showing how impossible it is to understand war, especially to people who have no part in making decisions but can only run from the outcomes. The author uses vivid imagery to bring a village and a journey to life. This is a beautiful, poignant family memoir; it made me tear up and also made me smile.
How to Pronounce Knife
[Winner, 2020 Giller Prize, and 2021 Trillium Book Award for English Prose;
finalist, National Critics Book Circle Award, and PEN Open Book Award]
(2020) by Souvankham Thammavongsa [O. Henry Award winner]
Here’s a sad book, a collection of stories about Lao people trying to assimilate. The title story is about a young woman who moves with her family to Canada, where the other kids tease her, she can’t make friends, she doesn’t like the food, and she’s very lonely. Another story is about an ugly woman working in a chicken processing plant who is considering getting a nose job because the other women who have done so got promoted to work in the office. In another, a young woman immigrant can only get a job at a hog farm picking worms out of the dirt. All of these stories were well written, but all of them were desperately sad.
BANNED BOOKS (alphabetical by author)
Year of Wonders (2001) by Geraldine Brooks (Pulitzer Prize-winning author)
[2002 winner of Alex Awards for Best Book; Washington Post Notable Book]
One of the most-banned books in the US from 2010–2019,
banned for witchcraft, sexuality and female empowerment.
This book is about the plague that swept across England in 1665–1666, and is based on the meticulously researched true story of one brave village that decided to quarantine itself to save its neighbors, if its neighbors would agree to bring food to the boundary stone. Told from the point of view of the part-time maid to the rector and his wife, we see how a small town of farmers and lead miners learned to depend on each other to survive. I’ve never had the pleasure of reading Geraldine Brooks before, but she is a spectacular storyteller, and the minute I finished this book, I added all her other books to my To Be Read list. The richness of description and depth of emotion in her storytelling is phenomenal!
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks [Winner, 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry]
Her poetry was banned for race, colonialism, and scandalous immorality.
Most famous for her short poem “We Real Cool,” a piece about Black youth, Gwendolyn Brooks in her early years often wrote long formal poetry that was nevertheless about modern subjects, such as racism and social justice. Later poems were free verse, influenced by jazz rhythms, with syncopation and alliteration. She wrote poems about everything from simple meals to the deaths of Black people at the hand of whites, and honored each moment by her noticing and recording of it. Ms. Brooks wrote hundreds of poems across 20 collections, so many (and so many long ones) that only a few were pulled from each book for this collection. Her second collection, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, Ms. Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, serving for 32 years, and also served as US Poet Laureate 1985–86. This is a spectacular collection by a masterful poet. Highly recommended.
The House on Mango Street (1983) by Sandra Cisneros
[Winner of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in Int’l Literature]
Banned 10 times in the US: studying Mexican-American culture was deemed “un-American” and supposedly promoted overthrow of US govt.
How could anyone think this little book was trying to overthrow the government? It’s written from a teenager’s point of view, and is simply dozens of vignettes about life in her barrio: the three widowed aunts who live together and read fortunes; the girl who wears makeup at school but wipes it off before she gets home; the four skinny trees that don’t get enough water but keep stretching up toward the sky; the boy who worked 12 hours a day to send money home to his family but got hit by a car and nobody knew who to tell. There’s an undercurrent of desperation in a lot of the vignettes, but because she wrote them in a girl’s voice, there’s also hope. I enjoyed the preface as much as the book, because the author tells about starting this book as a letter to her grandfather while she was still in college, then she got a job that just barely paid enough to get her own tiny apartment with no heat, and how she worked hard all day to pay for the apartment, then went back to her own place after work to write and write into the night. She kept her promise to the aunts never to forget where she came from, and to go back and help once she made her escape.
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Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021) by Malinda Lo
[Winner of Asian/Pacific American Literature and Stonewall Book Awards]
Banned 68 times in the US for a lesbian relationship in a historical setting.
Set in the 1950s, you have a couple of high-school girls, one Chinese, Lily, and one white, who sneak out at night to watch the male-impersonator at a female drag show in San Francisco’s Chinatown. At the show, Lily realizes she has feelings for Kathleen. Not only would it be disastrous to get caught, but there is also the added threat of police seeking any excuse to declare Chinese people un-American and deport them. Lily’s father, a doctor, is under scrutiny because he refuses to discuss a communist patient. So you have three main themes going on at once: the self-discovery of a teenager realizing she’s gay; her struggle about whether to be a dutiful daughter and give up her girlfriend or follow her heart and disappoint (and possibly lose) her family; and the anti-Asian climate of those days. I found the book’s pacing to be a little slow, but I lived in San Francisco for a decade, and I felt the author faithfully portrayed the underground community there, and the secrecy and justified paranoia of the McCarthy era.
A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) Sarah J. Maas
[Winner Best Fantasy Novel by RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Award]
Banned 102 times in the US for explicit sexual content and magic.
Well, those controlling killjoys weren’t successful in stopping people reading this book. It has sold over 13 million copies. Woo-hoo! Hooray for sexy pagans!
That said, I found the story pretty formulaic. Human female, written in first person, taken to Faery by a handsome, brooding Fae male, and there are two other Fae males she finds attractive or who are attracted to her, so there’s that whole thing. But, really? Aside from her two sisters, a cliché domestic Brownie, and a worse-cliché evil queen, there aren’t even any women who talk, and those four women are two-dimensional characters. The only other females just float around silently, looking pretty. Blech.
I’ll grant she wrote a plot with a few surprises, but when anybody writes about Faery courts, I compare them to the Merry Gentry books of Laurell K. Hamilton, who did both the sex and the magic much better. But almost no author writes that well, so I’ll say this book would not be disappointing for an off-night when you want a light distraction from your boring job,
if all you want is a little hot-and-heavy Fae fantasy with a snarky heroine who isn’t totally helpless and knows how to use a bow and arrows. It’s ok, but I mostly left it in here because I support sex-positive tree-huggers.
Sold (Nepali girl sold to brothel in India) [historical fiction]
(2006) Patricia McCormick [Winner, National Book Award]
#1 most banned book of 2025, due to child trafficking themes.
This sad book is written in the voice of a 12-year-old Nepali girl who thinks she is going to help her family by working as a maid for a rich family in India. Instead she is taken to a brothel and locked in a small room and beaten. Although this book is fiction, the author based every awful incident in the book on true events culled from interviews with girls in this very predicament. Girls in this situation are in terrible straits, because a madam buys them, and then keeps adding charges to their debt, such as food or medicine, plus exhorbitant interest, so although it is theoretically possible for a girl to pay off her debt and go free after perhaps 10 years, the life is so hard that almost all of them are worked until their health is gone (often less than 5 years), then sold to an even worse place or thrown into the street. And, of course, many of them have children, which increases the debt. When girls want to stay in bed and cry, the madam threatens to cut a foot off one of their children and sell the child to the Beggar Queen for a good price if the girl doesn’t stop crying and get back to work. It’s a horrible, hopeless life with little kindness, mostly from the girls comforting each other. The author’s note at the end said that 12,000 Nepali girls are sold into Indian brothels every year. I burst into tears when I read that number.
It’s so hard to read this book, but so important.
(Check out apne aap, a women’s group in India fighting sexual slavery.)
Beloved (1987) [Winner 1988 Pulitzer Prize] by Toni Morrison [Nobel Prize]
Banned 79 times for slavery, violence, infanticide, and sexual abuse.
“124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom.”
What a powerful opening phrase! You can tell this book is full of trauma.
People said this book was very sad, so I put off reading it, but I’m so glad I finally did. It’s an incredible book. Read it! Yes, it’s sad, but Toni Morrison is such a powerful writer that you can accept that sadness and keep reading more. She portrays the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that abuse, slavery and lack of freedom destroy people and relationships, yet she shows how people carry on trying to love, in spite of being terribly damaged. In case you haven’t read it either, it’s set in post-Civil War Ohio, and it’s about Sethe, a pregnant woman who fled slavery, and who lives with her daughter Denver in a house haunted by another daughter who died. (I enjoyed the strong thread of magical realism in her written tapestry.) It’s based on the true history of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped with her children, but was captured and returned to slavery. Importantly, this book centers Black life, Black thoughts, and Black experience. “There was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. They don’t know when to stop.”
Black Beauty (1877) by Anna Sewell
Banned in South Africa during apartheid because of the title alone.
Seriously? People really can be idiots sometimes. I first read this charming book when I was about 8 years old, and it’s written from the point of view of the freakin’ horse! How could they ban that? Unless, I suppose, since the horse is talking about how cruel some masters can be, maybe they took that as an indictment of their political system. Sheesh. Anyway, it’s a lovely book. I had to look up a lot of terms from an older age such as brougham
(a type of carriage), the difference between two horses that are paired
(side by side) or tandem (one in front of the other), and the types of tack used. I enjoyed reading about the different ways to train a horse, and what a horse fair was like, and all the beautiful descriptions of the countryside. This young adult book holds up well across 150 years.
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books [humor], by Kirsten Miller
There were so many heavy books in this month’s collection, I decided to end on a humorous note. Lula Dean is a self-righteous, book-banning conservative, who puts up a little library in her yard full of “good” books, like etiquette and cooking, but a local teen lesbian sneaks in at night and swaps them out, wrapping banned books in the conservative covers, and mayhem ensues! One of the characters is a retired lawyer whose adult kids are arguing over what they should get when she dies, and the revenge cake she baked on her birthday had me honk-laughing in public! This book addresses racism, Nazis, rape and book burning, with a respectful yet light take on its challenging subjects. And of course the pro-book gals win!
I hope you found something to read in this list. Support banned books!
This piece was written entirely by a human being without any AI assistance except for the passive AI of Google to check dates and awards.
