In the 2023-2024 school year, there were more than 10,000 instances of banned books in public schools, affecting more than 4,000 unique titles. These mass book bans were often the result of targeted campaigns to remove books with characters of color, LGBTQ+ identities, and sexual content from public school classrooms and libraries. As book bans reached an unprecedented high in the last school year, PEN America sought to further understand the impacts of this censorship – the identities, content areas, genres, and types of books that are being erased from America’s public schools. In November 2024, PEN America previously reported on the content of titles that had experienced two or more bans (1,091 titles); here, we include a more comprehensive analysis of all 4,218 titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year. What have we found? Book bans are not a hoax.
Activity tagged "books"
kind of a bummer to DNF a book I’d really been looking forward to (Children of Time), but life’s too short to read books you don’t want to read
The DOE “book banning hoax” press release claimed that challenged books are “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene”. Only 13% of banned books in 2023–24 included “on the page” sexual scenes—but 36% featured PoC characters and 25% featured LGBTQ characters.
give the brain a lil break today by hacking on the microblog. my books now show up in the activity feed and the reading list RSS feed.
now i'm going to go read my goofy dungeon crawler book
few emails i am so excited to receive
Introduced last week, Iowa's librarian criminalization bill has already made it to the House floor.
Update on the arm I bought to hold my e-reader for me: have just discovered this enables me to knit (simple patterns) while I read
Last night I finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and half a sock
was pretty jazzed to hear bookshop.org started selling e-books, but that DRM is a bummer 😞
kind of sucks that the best way to "buy" digital books at the moment is typically to pirate the book, then buy some shitty DRM-locked e-book you never open
even doing that i feel gross, like i'm encouraging these publishers to keep selling e-books this way
update: the library director was in today and showed me his secret space opera hoard. new additions to the list:
- August Kitko and the Mechas from Space, Alex White
- You Sexy Thing, Cat Rambo
(haven’t read either yet, but he highly recommends)
he also had two of the books i’d been wanting to include in the display!
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
- Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
call me when you figure out how to make working out more like reading (in bed with a cup of tea)
