International Literacy Day

On the Right to Read

September 8th marks International Literacy Day, an observance UNESCO created back in 1966 to spotlight a hard truth: the ability to read and write still isn’t a given for everyone on the planet. Worldwide, an estimated 775 million adults — the majority of them women — can’t read at all. And the problem isn’t confined to other countries. Here in the U.S., nearly one in five adults (21%) reads below a fifth-grade level, and an estimated 130 million U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level, according to Apex ABA Therapy. Sit with that for a second: this is a nation with more than 120,000 library branches and one of the highest volumes of published titles per year in the world — and that statistic should stop us in our tracks every single time.

At The Mojito Reader, we talk about books every week as if they are simply available to anyone who wants them. Today we want to sit with a harder truth: access to reading — to books, to libraries, to time, to the safety of a place that will let you be a reader — is unequally distributed in ways that are not accidental. And right now, in 2026, that access is under particular pressure. Books are being banned from school libraries at a rate not seen in decades. Librarians are resigning or being fired for protecting access to materials. Book clubs — especially those formed by communities who have historically been excluded from mainstream literary culture — are doing the quiet, essential work of keeping reading alive in the gaps the institutions have left.

This issue is our contribution to that conversation. It is not light reading. But it is, we believe, exactly the kind of reading that Self-Care September is also about — because understanding the world you live in, and what you can do in it, is a form of taking care of yourself and the people around you.

What Literacy Actually Means

Literacy is usually defined as the ability to read and write. But researchers and educators have long argued for a broader understanding — one that includes the ability to comprehend, evaluate, and use written information to participate fully in society. Health literacy. Financial literacy. Digital literacy. The capacity to read a lease, a medical form, a ballot, a contract, and understand what you are agreeing to.

By that wider measure, the literacy crisis is even larger than the numbers suggest. And it is worth naming plainly what illiteracy costs: it limits employment, housing, healthcare navigation, civic participation, and the ability to advocate for yourself and your family in systems designed to be navigated in writing. Illiteracy is not a personal failing. It is almost always the legacy of a system that failed the person first — through underfunded schools, interrupted education, poverty, disability, language barriers, or the simple absence of adults who had time and resources to read aloud.

Reading changes that. Not instantly, not magically, but measurably and permanently. Which is why access to books, libraries, and reading communities is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.

Libraries: The Most Radical Rooms in America

A public library is one of the few remaining spaces in American life where you can exist without being required to spend money, without being surveilled by advertisers, without being asked to justify your presence. You can sit in a library for hours, reading whatever you like, and no one will ask you to leave or buy something. For people experiencing housing insecurity, for children whose homes are not safe, for adults who work two jobs and have no quiet place, the library is not a convenience. It is essential.

Libraries also provide services that most people who have never needed them do not know about: job search assistance, tax preparation help, English language classes, digital literacy programs, story time for toddlers, homework help for teenagers, seed libraries, tool libraries, notary services, social workers on staff. The American Library Association reports that Americans visit public libraries more than 1.3 billion times per year — more than they attend professional sporting events, theme parks, and national parks combined.

And yet library funding is consistently among the first things cut in local budget crises. Branches close. Hours are reduced. Staff are laid off. The people who depend on libraries most are rarely the ones with the political power to protect them. Supporting your local library — financially, politically, by showing up and using it — is one of the most direct forms of community care available to anyone who reads.

Banned Books: Who Decides What You Are Allowed to Read

The American Library Association’s annual list of the most challenged and banned books in the United States has grown longer every year since 2020. In 2023, the ALA documented more than 4,000 unique titles targeted for removal from school and public libraries — the highest number ever recorded in the organization’s history. The vast majority of those challenges targeted books featuring LGBTQ+ characters, books by and about people of color, and books that addressed topics including racism, sexual health, and family structures that do not fit a narrow definition.

Book banning is not a new American phenomenon. It has targeted Mark Twain and Toni Morrison, The Diary of a Young Girl and The Color Purple, The Giver and And Tango Makes Three. What is new is the scale, the coordination, and the explicit targeting of school librarians, who are being placed in an impossible position: protect the books and face professional or legal consequences, or remove the books and fail the children who needed them most.

The children who need challenged books most are almost never the children of the people challenging them. A child who sees their family in a book for the first time — their two moms, their incarcerated parent, their experience of being the only brown face in a room full of white ones — does not experience that book as controversial. They experience it as recognition. And recognition, as every reader knows, is one of the most powerful things a book can deliver.

Banned Books Week, organized by the American Library Association, runs from September 21 to 27 this year. Their website at ala.org/bbooks lists challenged titles, resources for advocacy, and ways to support libraries facing pressure to remove books. We encourage every reader in our community to spend some time there.

Book Clubs: Reading as Community Practice

The book club is one of the oldest forms of organized reading in America, and one of the most underestimated. In the nineteenth century, women’s reading clubs were among the primary vehicles through which women without formal education gained access to literature, intellectual community, and public life. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s audiences were built partly through the networks of women’s clubs that read and discussed her work before Abraham Lincoln ever called her the little woman who started this great war.

That tradition has never stopped. Black reading groups — formal and informal — have sustained African American literary culture through every period of exclusion from mainstream publishing and book review culture. Today, communities including #BlackBookTok, the We Need Diverse Books organization, and thousands of neighborhood and church and library book groups are doing the same essential work: making sure that books reach the people they were written for, and creating space for those readers to respond.

If you are in a book club, you are participating in something with deep roots and real stakes. If you are not in one, September is a good time to start. The barrier to entry is exactly one book and exactly one other person willing to read it with you. Join Fable.co/club - different ongoing bookclubs to join. Mojito Book Club even has a couple in there.

How Reading Expands What You Are Capable Of

There is a body of research — published in peer-reviewed journals, replicated across multiple studies, debated and refined by cognitive scientists over the past two decades — that suggests reading literary fiction increases a person’s capacity for empathy. The proposed mechanism is straightforward: fiction requires you to inhabit a consciousness that is not your own, to follow the logic of a character whose experiences differ from yours, to feel what they feel without the distancing buffer of analysis. You do not read about grief. For a few hours, you grieve alongside someone you have never met.

That practice — of inhabiting another perspective with genuine imaginative commitment — turns out to be transferable. Readers of literary fiction perform better on tests that measure the ability to infer others’ emotional states. They are more likely to recognize complexity in people they initially perceived as simple. They are less likely to reduce individuals to their category membership.

This is not an argument that reading makes people good. People are complicated, and many avid readers have used that sophistication in the service of harm. But it is an argument that the practice of genuine literary reading — the kind that asks you to take another person seriously on their own terms — exercises something in us that matters. And that restricting access to that practice, for any child or community, has consequences that extend far beyond the books themselves.

What You Can Do: Small Actions, Real Impact

Get a library card if you do not have one. Use it. Every checkout is a data point that justifies funding. Many libraries now offer digital lending through apps like Libby and or Hoopla — free ebooks and audiobooks on your phone.

Donate books to your local Little Free Library, shelter, prison, or school. Books in institutions where people have limited access are among the most impactful donations available. PrisonBookProgram.org and LittleFreeLibrary.org are good starting points.

Buy from independent bookstores. Indie bookstores anchor literary communities, support local authors, and curate in ways that algorithms cannot. IndieBound.org can help you find one near you.

Show up at school board meetings when books are being challenged. The decisions about what remains on school library shelves are made locally, often in meetings that are poorly attended. Your presence and your voice count.

Read with a child. Aloud, together, regularly. The research on read-alouds is unambiguous: children who read develop vocabulary, comprehension, and a relationship with books that lasts their entire lives.

Support the ALA and your state library association. They are the organizations fighting, often with very limited resources, to protect library funding and resist censorship on behalf of all of us.

A Note for Self-Care September

We said at the beginning of this month that self-care is not only about rest. It is also about understanding the world you live in well enough to move through it with intention. Literacy — your own, and access to it for the people around you — is foundational to that. The ability to read a book, follow a contract, navigate a healthcare system, cast an informed vote, or simply sit with a story that makes you feel less alone: these are not privileges. They are rights. And they require active defense.

Emotional Health

This week we’re focusing on emotional health — making space to actually feel what you’re feeling instead of pushing it down. Emotional care is what helps you process, not just push through.

Try one (or a few) of these: Reading (can be done in a library), journaling (can be done in a library), meditating (can be done in a library), I think you get the message. Get a massage (I actually listen to an audio book during my massages), take a nap, scrapbook, have an outdoor picnic, get and give a hug, coloring in a coloring book, or watch a sunrise or sunset.

Ideas inspired by GoodRx.

Read. Advocate. Show up for your library. And see you Thursday.

The Mojito Reader · Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes · Published Every Tuesday & Thursday

International Literacy Day Edition | Self-Care September