7 ms·

During Banned Books Week, Readers Explore What It Means to Challenge Texts

24 points by rolph 5y ago

rkk3 5y ago
Worth noting, this only cover new bans in 2020. > The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 156 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2020. So you really have two categories of books. 1) New books which had widespread media coverage in 2020, which someone considered controversial. (Most of the books on the list) 2) Old Books which were considered classics but are now being challenged because of changing societal norms. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird)
camjohnson26 5y ago
It’s odd that truly offensive titles like Mein Kampf are missing. This study relies on self reported figures so may not tell the full story. This is also interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pvbkug/what_is_a_book_no_one_should_ever_read/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pvbkug/what_is_a... Nothing about censoring COVID information either. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-quietly-removes-coronavirus-books/ https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-quietly-removes-coronavir...
- kiba 5y ago
  It's all about books that people read, not books they don't read. Nobody's going to read Mein Kampf because it's a boring screech. For example, Harry Potter is on the 2019 list of challenged/banned books. So popular titles are going to get challenged for various reasons.
- dogorman 5y ago
  When librarians speak of banned books, they are talking about books other people wanted banned, not the books librarians themselves wanted banned. Harry Potter gets on these lists because some christian groups in America demanded that librarians remove the book from their shelves, while the librarians didn't want to. But books that the librarians themselves chose to not stock don't get on the list, because to a librarian, a librarians job is to select which books to stock and which not to. You are very unlikely* to find a copy of Myth of the 20th Century on the shelves of your local public library, not because of external pressure but because the librarians themselves think that people shouldn't read it. And to librarians, that is not banning. *(I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.)
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Does anyone even want to read that book though? It would be more interesting if there was some widely read book that wasn't available.
    - camjohnson26 5y ago
      All of the books on the NPR list are available at my local library and Amazon. Seems ridiculous to call them the most banned books in that case. The Anarchist’s cookbook is on Amazon but not my local library for example.
    - dogorman 5y ago
      Most people don't want to read most earnestly banned books. It's a very notorious book though, it would probably garner more attention than many uncontroversial books in the long tail of most library collections, which are neither loved nor hated, notorious nor famous. But a lot of the people interested in reading it would probably have right wing inclinations, and the average librarian doesn't want to support that sort of thing (not least because the nazis themselves were big on book burning..)
      - Amezarak 5y ago
        I would not be surprised to learn that modern librarians have permanently destroyed and lost more books in the past five years than the Nazis did in their entire reign. Most of it is less nakedly ideological - its presented as necessary due to the collection size - but certainly not all of it. There are many famous cases if you Google it, and it is happening quietly all the time on the local scale. Talk to your local librarian - I was shocked to learn their methodology.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Perhaps a better metric of a "banned" book would be the most requested yet unaccepted book.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > (I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.) If you really want to test your hypothesis out, a simple search is not enough. There are tons of books the libraries I'm a member of don't have. However, libraries are often part of networks that will lend or purchase requested books for their members from other libraries or publishers. Ask a librarian if they can help you borrow or find the book. Chances are they'll help you out or point you to someone who can if they can't.
- johnNumen 5y ago
  Remember--Amazon is just a private company, so it's not censorship! Say it three times fast and it becomes true :)
  - gumby 5y ago
    It’s true if you say it only once, or even not at all.
    - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
      in the age of monopolies - the whole "it's private" has less and less practical meaning. Is it a violation of 1A? No. should we be reconsidering laws in an age where all ephemeral discussion is gone and near all discussion or communication or media is now permanent and flows through Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter? Absolutely. The web was never meant to be so centralized and monopolized. The web has "disrupted" so many industries (ie, flat out destroyed them and then consolidated their functions under one of the main web companies), there's decreasing less alternatives for private platforms. Censoring speech on private platforms was a really different animal 10 years ago.
wizard-beta 5y ago
A distinction should be made between banned books that were actually censored by governments, and "banned books" that merely featured in pathetic political quarrels at American middle schools and whose "banning" consisted of a school board of boomers removing them from the school library
- kiba 5y ago
  Schools are part of the government.
  - wizard-beta 5y ago
    So? If the extent of the "ban" is discontinue of availability at a middle school by the authority of a local government or citizen school board in Oklahoma or some such place, it is still a very feeble form of censorship that I don't find interesting at all - just as I'm not interested in what books are or aren't available at the premises of any other local Oklahoma government department building. Anyone can just buy these supposedly banned books themselves if they want to read it. It's not comparable to books that are actually banned.
    - Miner49er 5y ago
      These bans probably mostly effect kids, who are probably the least likely people to be able to buy the books themselves.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  Yes, the annual banned books list is essentially a list of books favored by the averaged ideology of education majors, librarians, and journalists. There is never anything actually suppressed or controversial on the list. I'm not even arguing that truly censored books do have intrinsic merit, but the banned books list is just a list of books certain people want you to think are edgy and that you should read to advance their ideology. It's marketing. Amazon and other bookstores are actually banning books, often in collaboration with government funded NGOs. 95% of these books are actual trash fires, sure, but those are banned books. On top of that, public libraries are performing slow, partly ideological purges of existing collections - there's probably more books being permanently destroyed/lost today than in the history of mankind.
jihadjihad 5y ago
There is a list of oft-banned books in the US on Wikipedia [0] that has some...interesting items on it. For example, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby's crime is "Encouraging poor spelling." 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng...
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  My wife, a librarian, would probably support banning a lot of Pikey's books and graphic novel in general before those dealing with mature or challenging content. Crimes against the word vs. the world, I guess.
  - RhysU 5y ago
    Then she hasn't seen Pilkey's literary cleverness. I about fell out of a chair when, after chapters and chapters of set up, Pilkey titled a chapter "The Great Cat's Bee" at the turning point in a narrative. Then I turned to my kid and I explained why it was so funny. https://dog-man.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_pop_culture_references_in_Dog_Man https://dog-man.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_pop_culture_referenc...
- Natsu 5y ago
  There was nudity in Where's Waldo!?
MarkLowenstein 5y ago
Pertinent: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook... a list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books in order to inform the public about censorship in libraries and schools. The lists are based on information from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF from communities across the U.S. So it's (1) voluntarily submitted, like an Internet poll, (2) it is from libraries AND schools (not just school libraries), and (3) the library had to already carry the book, which means that if the library itself felt like the book was too inappropriate to shelve, it will not be represented here. In other words, take the NPR article with a grain of salt, or skip altogether. Whatever you learn is unlikely to be accurate.
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  Talking about censorship and banned books should be to highlight what is politically incorrect and indefensible in society, the ideas that are too dangerous to even consider. By seeing what ideas we reject on instinct we can highlight society’s biases. I find it hard to believe that most people would consider the books on this list too dangerous to allow people to read, they seem relatively tame. It’s much more likely that we would ban books dealing with pedophilia or rape, classified government information, COVID misinformation, or encouraging violence.
  - SquishyPanda23 5y ago
    > highlight what is politically incorrect and indefensible in society The big one here of course is communism. Arguably the most censored idea in the history of American politics. The government even held hearings to track down adherents. In some places it's still difficult to have an uncensored discussion about much tamer topics like labor organizing. > pedophilia Lolita was frequently banned > classified government information This is generally celebrated rather than challenged by readers. The Pentagon Papers, Snowden leaks, and the Panama papers are famous examples.
    - camjohnson26 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
Oho! Seems like same kinds of people who complain about “censorship” these days are the kinds of people doing it at the school level. > But there's been a "notable shift" in the subject matter of books now being challenged in the U.S. When the American Library Association released its list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2020 in April, the books that received the most challenges to libraries and schools dealt with "racism, Black American history and diversity in the United States,"
- Miner49er 5y ago
  If you read the reasons books are banned, it seems to come from both sides of the political spectrum, depending on the book.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Sure, but I was referring to the part, “the books that received the most challenges,,,”
    - Miner49er 5y ago
      Yeah, but books dealing with, "racism, Black American history and diversity in the United States" were challenged from both sides of the political spectrum. Maybe I'm misunderstanding who you were referring to in your original comment.
xdennis 5y ago
No mention of the most dangerous author of them all: Dr. Suess.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mcphage 5y ago
  How often has Dr. Seuss been banned?
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    It was in the news cycle recently: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/03/04/dr-seuss-books-sales-spike-after-some-banned-racist-imagery/6917679002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/03/0...
    - mcphage 5y ago
      Did I miss the part where his books were banned?
woodruffw 5y ago
The comments on this article are astounding: people are minimizing an actual example of public censorship (the removal of books from public and school libraries) because it doesn’t meet their confounded, funhouse-mirror standard of free speech (children memorizing Mein Kampf?). We seem to have completely lost the message: this kind of censorship matters the most, because it overwhelmingly concerns public repositories of knowledge and people who otherwise can’t access that knowledge (minors).
- Amezarak 5y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying that. People are rolling their eyes because these lists are inevitably comprised of extremely popular books that were once, usually temporarily, removed from a single school library somewhere in the US. There are books these libraries cannot even buy and which the school librarians will often not buy or even destroy for ideological reasons, but these books do not appear on these lists. Only the popular, famous, and widely available books that are often on required reading lists. EDIT: A great example is To Kill A Mockingbird, which always appears on these lists. TKAM was once 'banned' because people considered it too antiracist, now it is often 'banned' (rare isolated instances in either case) because it contains racial slurs. Nevertheless for the past 20 years almost every American schoolchild has been required to read TKAM. It is absolutely absurd to speak of it in any meaningful sense as a banned book. It's just a book librarians and teachers love that sometimes gets complaints.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Educators are, by conventional understanding, supposed to educate. These lists contain books that either have educational value, or are otherwise instrumental in the educational process (read: books that cause children to develop positive reading happens, typically by containing fantastical elements that Christian groups disapprove of). This is what distinguishes TKAM (a selective choice, given that the overwhelming majority of the books in TFA are much newer) from Mein Kampf.

24 points by rolph 5y ago

rkk3 5y ago

Worth noting, this only cover new bans in 2020. > The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 156 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2020. So you really have two categories of books. 1) New books which had widespread media coverage in 2020, which someone considered controversial. (Most of the books on the list) 2) Old Books which were considered classics but are now being challenged because of changing societal norms. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird)

camjohnson26 5y ago

It’s odd that truly offensive titles like Mein Kampf are missing. This study relies on self reported figures so may not tell the full story. This is also interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pvbkug/what_is_a_book_no_one_should_ever_read/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pvbkug/what_is_a... Nothing about censoring COVID information either. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-quietly-removes-coronavirus-books/ https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-quietly-removes-coronavir...

kiba 5y ago
It's all about books that people read, not books they don't read. Nobody's going to read Mein Kampf because it's a boring screech. For example, Harry Potter is on the 2019 list of challenged/banned books. So popular titles are going to get challenged for various reasons.
dogorman 5y ago
When librarians speak of banned books, they are talking about books other people wanted banned, not the books librarians themselves wanted banned. Harry Potter gets on these lists because some christian groups in America demanded that librarians remove the book from their shelves, while the librarians didn't want to. But books that the librarians themselves chose to not stock don't get on the list, because to a librarian, a librarians job is to select which books to stock and which not to. You are very unlikely* to find a copy of Myth of the 20th Century on the shelves of your local public library, not because of external pressure but because the librarians themselves think that people shouldn't read it. And to librarians, that is not banning. *(I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.)
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Does anyone even want to read that book though? It would be more interesting if there was some widely read book that wasn't available.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    All of the books on the NPR list are available at my local library and Amazon. Seems ridiculous to call them the most banned books in that case. The Anarchist’s cookbook is on Amazon but not my local library for example.
  - dogorman 5y ago
    Most people don't want to read most earnestly banned books. It's a very notorious book though, it would probably garner more attention than many uncontroversial books in the long tail of most library collections, which are neither loved nor hated, notorious nor famous. But a lot of the people interested in reading it would probably have right wing inclinations, and the average librarian doesn't want to support that sort of thing (not least because the nazis themselves were big on book burning..)
    - Amezarak 5y ago
      I would not be surprised to learn that modern librarians have permanently destroyed and lost more books in the past five years than the Nazis did in their entire reign. Most of it is less nakedly ideological - its presented as necessary due to the collection size - but certainly not all of it. There are many famous cases if you Google it, and it is happening quietly all the time on the local scale. Talk to your local librarian - I was shocked to learn their methodology.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Perhaps a better metric of a "banned" book would be the most requested yet unaccepted book.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > (I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.) If you really want to test your hypothesis out, a simple search is not enough. There are tons of books the libraries I'm a member of don't have. However, libraries are often part of networks that will lend or purchase requested books for their members from other libraries or publishers. Ask a librarian if they can help you borrow or find the book. Chances are they'll help you out or point you to someone who can if they can't.
johnNumen 5y ago
Remember--Amazon is just a private company, so it's not censorship! Say it three times fast and it becomes true :)
- gumby 5y ago
  It’s true if you say it only once, or even not at all.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    in the age of monopolies - the whole "it's private" has less and less practical meaning. Is it a violation of 1A? No. should we be reconsidering laws in an age where all ephemeral discussion is gone and near all discussion or communication or media is now permanent and flows through Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter? Absolutely. The web was never meant to be so centralized and monopolized. The web has "disrupted" so many industries (ie, flat out destroyed them and then consolidated their functions under one of the main web companies), there's decreasing less alternatives for private platforms. Censoring speech on private platforms was a really different animal 10 years ago.

wizard-beta 5y ago

A distinction should be made between banned books that were actually censored by governments, and "banned books" that merely featured in pathetic political quarrels at American middle schools and whose "banning" consisted of a school board of boomers removing them from the school library

kiba 5y ago
Schools are part of the government.
- wizard-beta 5y ago
  So? If the extent of the "ban" is discontinue of availability at a middle school by the authority of a local government or citizen school board in Oklahoma or some such place, it is still a very feeble form of censorship that I don't find interesting at all - just as I'm not interested in what books are or aren't available at the premises of any other local Oklahoma government department building. Anyone can just buy these supposedly banned books themselves if they want to read it. It's not comparable to books that are actually banned.
  - Miner49er 5y ago
    These bans probably mostly effect kids, who are probably the least likely people to be able to buy the books themselves.
Amezarak 5y ago
Yes, the annual banned books list is essentially a list of books favored by the averaged ideology of education majors, librarians, and journalists. There is never anything actually suppressed or controversial on the list. I'm not even arguing that truly censored books do have intrinsic merit, but the banned books list is just a list of books certain people want you to think are edgy and that you should read to advance their ideology. It's marketing. Amazon and other bookstores are actually banning books, often in collaboration with government funded NGOs. 95% of these books are actual trash fires, sure, but those are banned books. On top of that, public libraries are performing slow, partly ideological purges of existing collections - there's probably more books being permanently destroyed/lost today than in the history of mankind.

jihadjihad 5y ago

There is a list of oft-banned books in the US on Wikipedia [0] that has some...interesting items on it. For example, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby's crime is "Encouraging poor spelling." 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng...

skeeter2020 5y ago
My wife, a librarian, would probably support banning a lot of Pikey's books and graphic novel in general before those dealing with mature or challenging content. Crimes against the word vs. the world, I guess.
- RhysU 5y ago
  Then she hasn't seen Pilkey's literary cleverness. I about fell out of a chair when, after chapters and chapters of set up, Pilkey titled a chapter "The Great Cat's Bee" at the turning point in a narrative. Then I turned to my kid and I explained why it was so funny. https://dog-man.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_pop_culture_references_in_Dog_Man https://dog-man.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_pop_culture_referenc...
Natsu 5y ago
There was nudity in Where's Waldo!?

MarkLowenstein 5y ago

Pertinent: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook... a list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books in order to inform the public about censorship in libraries and schools. The lists are based on information from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF from communities across the U.S. So it's (1) voluntarily submitted, like an Internet poll, (2) it is from libraries AND schools (not just school libraries), and (3) the library had to already carry the book, which means that if the library itself felt like the book was too inappropriate to shelve, it will not be represented here. In other words, take the NPR article with a grain of salt, or skip altogether. Whatever you learn is unlikely to be accurate.

camjohnson26 5y ago
Talking about censorship and banned books should be to highlight what is politically incorrect and indefensible in society, the ideas that are too dangerous to even consider. By seeing what ideas we reject on instinct we can highlight society’s biases. I find it hard to believe that most people would consider the books on this list too dangerous to allow people to read, they seem relatively tame. It’s much more likely that we would ban books dealing with pedophilia or rape, classified government information, COVID misinformation, or encouraging violence.
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  > highlight what is politically incorrect and indefensible in society The big one here of course is communism. Arguably the most censored idea in the history of American politics. The government even held hearings to track down adherents. In some places it's still difficult to have an uncensored discussion about much tamer topics like labor organizing. > pedophilia Lolita was frequently banned > classified government information This is generally celebrated rather than challenged by readers. The Pentagon Papers, Snowden leaks, and the Panama papers are famous examples.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago

gumby 5y ago

Oho! Seems like same kinds of people who complain about “censorship” these days are the kinds of people doing it at the school level. > But there's been a "notable shift" in the subject matter of books now being challenged in the U.S. When the American Library Association released its list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2020 in April, the books that received the most challenges to libraries and schools dealt with "racism, Black American history and diversity in the United States,"

Miner49er 5y ago
If you read the reasons books are banned, it seems to come from both sides of the political spectrum, depending on the book.
- gumby 5y ago
  Sure, but I was referring to the part, “the books that received the most challenges,,,”
  - Miner49er 5y ago
    Yeah, but books dealing with, "racism, Black American history and diversity in the United States" were challenged from both sides of the political spectrum. Maybe I'm misunderstanding who you were referring to in your original comment.

xdennis 5y ago

No mention of the most dangerous author of them all: Dr. Suess.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mcphage 5y ago
How often has Dr. Seuss been banned?
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  It was in the news cycle recently: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/03/04/dr-seuss-books-sales-spike-after-some-banned-racist-imagery/6917679002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/03/0...
  - mcphage 5y ago
    Did I miss the part where his books were banned?

woodruffw 5y ago

The comments on this article are astounding: people are minimizing an actual example of public censorship (the removal of books from public and school libraries) because it doesn’t meet their confounded, funhouse-mirror standard of free speech (children memorizing Mein Kampf?). We seem to have completely lost the message: this kind of censorship matters the most, because it overwhelmingly concerns public repositories of knowledge and people who otherwise can’t access that knowledge (minors).

Amezarak 5y ago
I don't think anyone is saying that. People are rolling their eyes because these lists are inevitably comprised of extremely popular books that were once, usually temporarily, removed from a single school library somewhere in the US. There are books these libraries cannot even buy and which the school librarians will often not buy or even destroy for ideological reasons, but these books do not appear on these lists. Only the popular, famous, and widely available books that are often on required reading lists. EDIT: A great example is To Kill A Mockingbird, which always appears on these lists. TKAM was once 'banned' because people considered it too antiracist, now it is often 'banned' (rare isolated instances in either case) because it contains racial slurs. Nevertheless for the past 20 years almost every American schoolchild has been required to read TKAM. It is absolutely absurd to speak of it in any meaningful sense as a banned book. It's just a book librarians and teachers love that sometimes gets complaints.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Educators are, by conventional understanding, supposed to educate. These lists contain books that either have educational value, or are otherwise instrumental in the educational process (read: books that cause children to develop positive reading happens, typically by containing fantastical elements that Christian groups disapprove of). This is what distinguishes TKAM (a selective choice, given that the overwhelming majority of the books in TFA are much newer) from Mein Kampf.