Not an Outlier. A Preview for 2024.

What the list of 673 books banned from Orange County (Fla) classrooms says about the direction of the book-banning movement.

Imagine being a high school literature teacher in Florida’s Orange County, trying foster a love of reading in your students, introduce them to the wonders of great literature, and prepare them for the rigors of college literary analysis. Imagine trying to put together a syllabus, supplemental reading lists, a classroom library to help you reach those goals.

Now imagine trying to do those things and then receiving this document from your district leadership. It’s a list of 673 books currently forbidden from classroom libraries, uncovered by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and printed this week in the Orlando Sentinel. If you think the book ban debates revolves around a handful of newfangled books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue, the list will be shocking: Ovid. Milton. Proust. Steinbeck. Thomas Hardy. Ralph Ellison. Richard Wright. All banned from classroom libraries.

The House of the Spirits has appeared on the last two AP Literature exams; it’s off limits now. Disgrace, by Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, is also gone. So are four books by Toni Morrison, and eight books by Margaret Atwood. Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award, is forbidden now, too.

Time’s list of the 100 best Young Adult novels of all time is littered with books that are no longer allowed in the district. Ready Player One is forbidden. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

How would you teach literature in a situation like that?

673 books is a lot of books. There’s no way to remove that many books from a district without seriously hampering the culture of reading in that district’s schools.

Unfortunately, lists of this size will become more and more common in 2024 in districts in Florida, Texas, and other states where the book panic has gained ground. Orange County isn’t an outlier; it’s a preview of what’s to come.

We’re already seeing this in Texas. The book panic in Conroe ISD started in 2022 with a list of 35 books, only a handful of which were ever formally challenged. But by the end of 2023, 120 books had been removed from district libraries, almost all of them through a process of “internal review.” And district teachers received a separate (but overlapping) list of 113 books they are not allowed to have in their classroom libraries. That list includes Salvage the Bones, Junot Diaz’s Drown, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. One district teacher told me that teachers have been “asked to remove additional titles every month.”

This week, the Washington Post ran a story about book challenges, noting that the vast majority of formal challenges have been made by a handful of individuals, and that around half of all books formally challenged ultimately get returned to the shelves. But what the Post is missing is that the book-banning movement isn’t really running on formal challenges anymore.¹ Instead, books are more and more likely to be removed wholesale via internal reviews, as districts force librarians and educators to apply newer, stricter criteria to entire collections. The people who last year were formally challenging a few individual books have now successfully pressured district leaders to view every book as a potential risk, and to adopt policies that treat them as such.

It’s no wonder that teachers in multiple districts across Texas have shut down their classroom libraries out of an abundance of caution. The same thing has apparently happened in Orange County.  

I don’t think many people realize the scale of what’s coming. People who follow headlines, who are vaguely aware of the culture war surrounding books, think this is about a handful of books: Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, maybe The Bluest Eye. Maybe they’re upset about the principle of the matter, but ultimately, they don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Five or six books, tops.

The book banners want you to think bigger—they’ll happily send you a list of 300 or 400 books they think should be removed from schools. They pad those lists with books no sane American would find troubling, but they do so because long lists help promote their preferred narratives: that public schools are breeding grounds of immorality, and that Marxist, deviant teachers and librarians (propped up by Communist unions) are grooming and indoctrinating young people.

But even they don’t understand the consequences of what they’ve unleashed. Because it’s true: if you’re going to remove Toni Morrison books for sexual content, you should also remove Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and Jesmyn Ward, and John Steinbeck, and Geoffrey Chaucer, and Aristophanes. And if you’re ruling out books that introduce ideas about “gender fluidity” (as districts in Florida and Texas have done), you’re going to exclude Ovid and Homer and Virginia Woolf. And if you’re going to limit the ways people talk about race, racism, and American history in school, you’re probably ruling out texts by Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen and James Baldwin.

I started 2023—and this Substack—by writing that no book is safe in this censorious climate. I worried people would think I was being overdramatic—even though I was just extrapolating from the actual words of people trying to remove books from schools. But the course of 2023 has proven that post correct.

Now, as 2023 turns to 2024, I hope people listen when I say I’m concerned about what’s coming next. Orange County shows that what’s at stake in these debates is the teaching of literature in general.² We’re not talking about the fate of a handful of books; we’re talking about the whole library.

1. In part, book banners have stopped formally challenging books because those challenges often fail. Pressuring districts to remove books through “internal reviews”—without any formal process—is both more efficient and more effective.

2. These developments come along with an increased emphasis on standardized testing (which generally devalues the reading of complex, long texts), as well as the collapse of the English major and universities cutting funding for humanities programs. Even though Houston ISD’s decision to close libraries and turn them into discipline centers wasn’t officially about censoriousness, the two phenomena are related.