TeenHQ Theater, in a special collaboration between SJPL and SJSU to honor Banned Book Week 2025 performs THE HOBBIT with its first intergenerational cast.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a notoriously banned book for its magical themes. Most notably it was banned in 2001 in Alamagordo, New Mexico by a Christian rights group that held a book burning, claiming the book was satanic.

Bilbo Baggins is a comfortably well-off hobbit with a love for rousing adventure stories. Real adventures, however, are definitely not his cup of tea. So when Gandalf the wizard knocks at Bilbo’s door, bringing with him Thorin Oakenshield, 11 ragged looking dwarfs and a contract for an adventure to recover the lost treasure of Lonely Mountain, Bilbo could not be less interested—at first. But Bilbo’s love of a good story gets the better of him, and before he knows it, he is off on a perilous quest over mountain and under hill through caves and forest and slimy dark places.

(Appropriate for a General Audience)

Join the SJSU King Library and the San José Public Library — in partnership with the SJSU Pride Center, SJSU College of the Humanities & the Arts, SJSU Department of Humanities, SJSU Center for Steinbeck Studies, SJSU School of Information, Santa Clara City Library, California State Senator Dave Cortese, SJSU Department of English & Comparative Literature, SJSU Department of African American Studies, SJSU Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the SJSU Artistic Excellence Programming Grants — as we celebrate Banned Books Week with a week's worth of events highlighting our right to read freely.