2025 Banned Books Week Celebrates The City of Dragons!

Those wonderful, beautiful, magical, and awesome creatures - dragons - have their detractors and not just the folks they devour. Books about, or including, dragons have been banned and/or challenged around the world. Even if you are not a fan of dragons, you have probably heard of one or more of these banned/challenged books. Here are a few of them:

The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
The Lord of the Rings series by J. R. R. Tolkien
Dragon in a Bag by Zetta Elliott
Damsel by Elana K. Arnold
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

This year’s Banned Book Week project celebrates dragons with a scarf with long, pointed tails, plenty of scales, and shiny beads galore. The name comes from Kelsingra, the city of dragons, in Robin Hobb’s Rain Wild Chronicles (4 books in the Realm of the Elderlings 16 book series). Kelsingra, the city of dragons and their Elderlings, is full of light. From the globes along hallways, the jidzin strips that light your path with just a touch, or the windows that get larger the higher you climb until you reach the magnificent windows that give a panoramic view of the city from the Map Tower, Kelsingra is a city of lights that shine on the gem-like hides of dragons.

The yardage requirements will depend on if you knit the scarf without any embellishment (beads or Nupps) or if you use beads throughout. For that scenario, you will need 550 yards of fingering weight yarn. If you are a fan of Nupps and use those instead of beads, you will need 700 yards of fingering weight yarn (Like dragons, Nupps have voracious appetites.)

Prefer a shawl to a scarf? The shawl version, Kelsingra, is available for this year’s Banned Books Week.

For my scarf, I chose Miss Babs Tarte in the light golden Billy Button colorway because who doesn’t like a gold dragon.