BookNotes: Adults only, and only what we say

Guess what, kids? Don’t bother reading! Ever!

That’s the message in Idaho, as new laws requiring a certain amount of insulation between the children’s section and adult books cannot be achieved in the Donnelly Public Library because the building is literally too small. So now the library will be adults-only. Children not allowed. Oh, they’re going to try to have children’s programming, but the parents will have to sign a waiver so the librarians don’t go to jail.

The incredibly restrictive new Idaho law, which permits the removal of any book based on a single person’s complaint, is being challenged by a lawsuit. By the way, some of the challengers in that suit include private schools and churches, which are just as disgusted as the rest of us.

In other First Amendment news:

• Louisiana is about to make it illegal to join the American Library Association. Librarians who join or just attend a conference co-sponsored by ALA can spend up to two years in jail. How this doesn’t violate the First Amendment clause for freedom of association is beyond me, but I am not a constitutional scholar. PEN America has a thorough write-up.

• Huntington Beach, California has passed an ordinance forbidding children’s access to books with sexual content so vaguely worded that it would definitely exclude the Bible, Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby, not that I’d particularly recommend the latter. (Shush, Gatsby fans. I said what I said.) But that’s not the only thing they’re up to. They’ve established a committee to audit the children’s library, removing all books from circulation until they’ve been approved, and seeking bids to outsource management of the library to a private company. Fortunately California is considering a California Freedom to Read Act that would protect the kids of Huntington Beach from such scary concepts as Everyone Poops. 

• Another week, another bomb threat against a university library. And a public library. And another. In case you’re wondering, this is not normal.

• You know I couldn’t leave out Florida, right? Apparently book bans have skyrocketed 148 percent in the last three years. Another 26 were reviewed and only eight retained this week in Citrus County, based on a complaint from one person. Nearly 2,700 titles have been targeted, and Florida has had more book challenges than any other state.

Escambia County has the winning (?) number with more than 1,600 removed as of December, including the Guinness Book of World Records, The Diary of Anne Frank, The House on Mango Street, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Black Panther and The Autobiography of Malcolm X; as well as head-scratching bans on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Wuthering Heights, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Princess Diaries, biographies of Chaucer, Hank Williams, Leonardo da Vinci, Mickey Mantle and John Glenn; and 100 Women Who Made History. We can’t have kids reading that! The usual suspects are represented, from Judy Blume to Stephen King to Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner to Hemingway to Maya Angelou. We’re totally unsurprised to see books like Black Like Me and Song of Solomon and Brave New World, but National Geographic’s Science Encyclopedia for Kids: Atom Smashing, Food Chemistry, Animals, Space and More! pretty much boggled me.

And sanity prevails in, of all places, Tennessee. Knox County vetoed restrictions on any material with images of sex from school libraries, as it would exclude books like Maus. Unfortunately, a state law is about to go into effect that will probably make their decision moot. Meanwhile, the people of Alpena County, Michigan are fighting back after their county board fired the entire library board for refusing to ban books. 

On the darker side: LitHub has an analysis of what Project 2025 means for books and reading. Spoiler: It ain’t good.

A reminder to the pearl-clutchers of America: Disliking a subject doesn’t give you the right to ban a book about it. And I would really love it if I didn’t have this much book-banning in my inbox every single week.