According to its website, Georgia’s Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl “is the original reading competition created by Georgia educators to encourage students to read!”
But this year, the competition is restricting and censoring the books it’s encouraging students to read. According to Book Riot, the titles are selected “annually through a process that has school and public librarians read widely across recently-published titles to select 20 finalists” for various reading levels from kindergarten to 12th grade.
This year, eight books have been removed from the high school level in an opaque process that looks like the Reading Bowl capitulated to some loud book-banning voices. They don’t want kids reading about book bans, either.
More via Book Riot:
The decision came after “receiving numerous reconsideration requests about some of the books nominated for the 2025-2026 Georgia Peach Book Award for Teen Readers.” The steering committee elected to remove eight books from the list, not only narrowing the breadth of titles being discussed by teens across the state, but also narrowing the number of books they will be reading in anticipation of voting for the Georgia Peach Book Awards.
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