Book bans have increased nearly 200%. Florida and Iowa are partly to blame

Over 10,000 books have been banned across the entire United States over the past school year. The trend has seen a particularly strong increase in states with a strong Republican presence, according to the free-speech nonprofit PEN America.

This is a major increase compared to the 2022-2023 year, which saw a total of 3,362 books banned across the country.

Florida and Iowa are leading in the total number of bans, with over 8,000 recorded between the two states. This number is largely due to the increasingly strict laws on book bans.

The banned books include Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie; the famous work on anti-Black racism Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois; Alex Haley’s book about the lived experience of slaves, Roots: The Saga of an American Family; and James Baldwin’s autobiography Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Iowa’s bans stem from Senate File 496, a law restricting LGBTQ+ books from…

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