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Books of 2024!
Sep 24 2023
This summer, Iris Mogul – a junior at a Miami high school – found out that she wouldn’t be able to take an AP African American history course that she had planned for the coming semester because it had been blocked by the state’s department of education. “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department said in a statement.
“It felt so far away when I first heard about all of this,” says Mogul, who only had a passing knowledge of book challenges and changes to school curriculum previously. “But that is really when it hit me – when it started to affect me directly.”
Now, Mogul is prominent among the growing number of students and parents in Miami-Dade county and across Florida who are speaking out in opposition to book challenges, the capture of Florida school boards by conservative activists and this summer’s latest policy changes, which includes the expansion of DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act...
Sep 21 2023
In conjunction with Banned Books Week (October 1-7), Simon & Schuster is launching Books Belong, a program that will highlight the merits of books that have been banned or challenged and provide tools and resources to "preserve and strengthen our right to read."
The Books Belong website hosts reading group guides and videos, book lists, giveaways, exclusive author and expert content, links to organizations such as Unite Against Book Bans, PEN America, and the National Coalition Against Censorship, and features the 1953 Freedom to Read Statement. Supporters of the right to read will find resources for them to take action when faced with a challenge in their community, as well as guidance on how to incorporate banned and challenged books into classroom, library, and family reading time. In addition, the program will be supported by social media promotion, consumer and B2B e-mails, and integration in Simon & Schuster's corporate and title advertising and marketing.
(Copy above thanks to Shelf Awareness)
Sep 19 2023
Finding that Texas's "sexual rating" law "violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment," federal district court judge Alan D. Albright yesterday issued a written order granting a preliminary injunction against implementation of the law. He also denied a motion from the defendants to dismiss the case. The judge had issued an oral preliminary injunction August 31. The law was scheduled to go into effect September 1.
Under the law, all companies selling to school libraries, librarians, and teachers in Texas would have to assign ratings to books concerning their sexual content.
The law also has a retroactive feature: by next April, all booksellers and other book vendors would have to submit to the Texas Education Agency a list of every book they've ever sold to a teacher, librarian, or school that qualifies for a sexual rating and is in active use. The stores also would be required to issue recalls for any sexually explicit books. If the Agency found that a bookstore has been incorrectly rating books, it could be banned from doing business with charter schools or school districts. The Agency could also override booksellers' ratings...
In his order, Judge Albright wrote that "the issue before this Court is whether the State of Texas is allowed to delegate the categorization to third parties like these plaintiffs. This Court holds that it may not, at least in the manner employed here."
"For whatever reason, Texas chose not to have anyone employed by the state at any level make the initial evaluation of the sexual content. It chose instead to impose this extraordinarily difficult and prohibitively expensive burden solely on third parties with totally insufficient guidance. And worse still, no matter how much time and expense the third parties invest in complying, the State (through the Texas Education Agency) retained the power to unilaterally alter any decision made by the third party."...
The law's "requirements for vendors are so numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature believed any third party could possibly comply," the judge added.
Sep 18 2023
The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender.
Politicians and parents on the right increasingly paint the association, known as the ALA, as a defender of pornographic literature for children — tying their allegations into a broader conservative movement that asserts school libraries are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts.
Over the summer, state libraries in Montana, Missouri and Texas announced that they were severing ties with the ALA, imperiling their libraries’ access to funding and training. The Texas decision was taken after state Rep. Brian Harrison (R) wrote to library leaders saying that “the ALA works against parents by fighting to keep pornographic materials in public libraries.” Conservative legislators in at least nine additional states are urging their state libraries to follow suit and disaffiliate. That includes Alabama, where state Rep. Susan DuBose in August published an op-ed calling the ALA “a conduit” for pornography. Four days later, Gov. Kay Ivey (R) wrote to her state’s library saying she was worried about “the environment” in libraries statewide and feared the ALA was “making the situation worse.”
Sep 07 2023
Poet Amanda Gorman has been named Indie Bookstore Ambassador for the American Booksellers Association for 2023-2024. She will be "a champion for independent bookstores" year round, including for Banned Books Week (October 1-7), Indies First on Small Business Saturday (November 25), and Independent Bookstore Day (April 27, 2024).
Gorman said she was "incredibly honored.... Independent bookstores are vital parts of our communities and bastions of literature. We must work together to support local booksellers everywhere so that they can continue to thrive and champion books on a local level with the personal touch and human connection that we all need, now more than ever."
Sep 05 2023
In a written motion filed late on September 1, attorneys for the state of Texas renewed their bid to stay a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of HB 900, the state’s controversial new book rating law, until the Fifth Circuit court of appeals can weigh in on the order...
In the filing, Texas attorneys renew their arguments that the state is protected by state sovereign immunity and that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the suit. But in a key point, state attorneys also argue that there are parts of the law that do not involve the plaintiffs’ claims—such as the creation of new state library collection standards—that should be allowed to take effect.
Aug 21 2023
On August 18, Federal Judge Alan D. Albright heard the first round of oral arguments in Austin, Tex., on a motion to block HB 900, Texas’s controversial new book rating law. But with Texas attorneys filing a motion to dismiss the case just days earlier, on August 16, Albright said he would need more time before ruling on either motion. The judge has set a second hearing for August 28, adding that he would rule before the law is set to take effect on September 1...
In his questions, Albright pointed out that the law as currently written does appear vague and unclear. He focused on the plaintiffs’ inability to “get relief” from the school districts should books be rated incorrectly. In addition, he noted that the law must address the future implications of a law, in this case, the potential for financial injury.
Albright also offered several implied criticisms of the law in the course of seeking clarification, asking whether or not John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would be deemed obscene because it contains a rape, and subsequently E. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and the Bible, both of which have explicit sexual references. He also asked after the fate of books depicting paintings by Caravaggio (the judge’s “favorite painter,” he said) and Michelangelo. Albright acknowledged that there were certainly works that could easily be deemed “sexually relevant,” but the part of the law that allowed books to be objected to if they were “patently offensive” and violated community standards, he implied, was problematic.
Aug 18 2023
Barnes & Noble, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Association of University Presses, the American Association of School Librarians, and Freedom to Learn Advocates have filed an amici curiae brief in support of a motion for a preliminary injunction against Texas's HB 900 "sexual rating" law, also known as the READER Act, which is scheduled to go into effect September 1. A group consisting of BookPeople, Austin, Tex.; the Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, Tex.; the American Booksellers Association; the Association of American Publishers; the Authors Guild; and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund filed suit last month, asking for preliminary and permanent injunctions against the law, which they call "the Book Ban."
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What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading, you wish the author that wrote it was a ...
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