Banned Books Week Spotlight Day 3: The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

This is one of my favorite books, and it still haunts me. Every detail of it feels like it could be a reality, and even a decade later after it was written it still feels like its about the present. It's like it a story suspended in time, increasingly more relevant. I read this book as a teenager in school and it solidified my ideals as a feminist. The ending after the epilogue is especially haunting.

Every time I hear about this book being banned, it feels like a cruel irony. The sexuality of the book is not erotic, it is saddening.

Have you read this book or seen the show at all?

Copied from Wikipedia, it's censorship information:

The American Library Association lists The Handmaid's Tale as number 37 on the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000".[56] In 2019, The Handmaid's Tale is still listed as the seventh-most challenged book because of profanity, vulgarity, and sexual overtones.[57] Atwood participated in discussing The Handmaid's Tale as the subject of an ALA discussion series titled "One Book, One Conference".[58]

In 2009 a parent in Toronto accused the book of being anti-Christian and anti-Islamic because the women are veiled and polygamy is allowed.[59] Rushowy reports that "The Canadian Library Association says there is 'no known instance of a challenge to this novel in Canada' but says the book was called anti-Christian and pornographic by parents after being placed on a reading list for secondary students in Texas in the 1990s."[60]

A 2012 challenge as required reading for a Page High School International Baccalaureate class and as optional reading for Advanced Placement reading courses at Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina because the book is "sexually explicit, violently graphic and morally corrupt". Some parents thought the book is "detrimental to Christian values".[61]

In November 2012, two parents protested against the inclusion of the book on a required reading list in Guilford County, North Carolina. The parents presented the school board with a petition signed by 2,300 people, prompting a review of the book by the school's media advisory committee. According to local news reports, one of the parents said "she felt Christian students are bullied in society, in that they're made to feel uncomfortable about their beliefs by non-believers. She said including books like The Handmaid's Tale contributes to that discomfort, because of its negative view on religion and its anti-biblical attitudes toward sex."[62]

In November 2021 in Wichita, Kansas, "The Goddard school district has removed more than two dozen books from circulation in the district's school libraries, citing national attention and challenges to the books elsewhere."[63]

In May 2022, Atwood announced that, in a joint project undertaken with Penguin Random House, an "unburnable" copy of the book would be produced and auctioned off, the project intended to "stand as a powerful symbol against censorship".[64] On 7 June 2022, the unique, "unburnable" copy was sold through Sotheby's in New York for $130,000.[65]