It’s Banned Books Week, My Dudes!

There’s not so much to celebrate this year.

Banned Books Week began Oct. 1 as new data from the American Library Association and PEN America documented more record-breaking challenges to books for young people. BookRiot and EveryLibrary Institute also released a new study of parent perceptions about censorship in public libraries that showed most oppose these growing restrictions on books.

As a result, what used to be a reason to “celebrate the freedom to read” has instead become a sobering time to take stock and a rallying point for those fighting censorship.

Honorary Banned Books Week chair Levar Burton will headline an Oct. 4 event about censorship, and the ALA has deemed Oct. 7 a day of action, dubbed Let Freedom Read Day. In tandem with the week, the New York Public Library announced its launch of a new digital banned-books club that will boost access nationwide to some targeted titles. First up is Mark Oshiro’s Each of Us A Desert, which will be available for download to anyone – library card holder or not – between October 2 and November 30.

Banned Books Week also follows the latest in a constant laundry list of censorship incidents across the country. Among the most recent examples: A Texas school district fired a teacher for assigning passages from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation to eighth-grade students, a North Carolina district pulled a picture book about red crayons (the crayon turns out to be blue), and the Alabama Public Library system announced it would create a list of “inappropriate” books for children to help parents.

The ALA chronicled 695 censorship attempts nationally between January and Aug. 31, a 20 percent increase over the same period last year, according to its Sept. 19 report. The challenges affected more than 1,900 titles, most of which featured characters of color or LGBTQ people, or had authors from those marginalized communities.

“These attacks on our freedom to read should trouble every person who values liberty and our constitutional rights,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which compiled the data.

PEN America also released a new tally ahead of Banned Books Week, finding a censorship spike of 33 percent during the 2022-23 school year compared with the previous year. Florida accounted for nearly 40 percent of the country’s book bans, according to the Sept. 21 report.

“The toll of the book banning movement is getting worse. More kids are losing access to books, more libraries are taking authors off the shelves, and opponents of free expression are pushing harder than ever to exert their power over students as a whole,” said PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel.

PEN America noted that bans have spread well past campus boundaries into public library systems. The Public Libraries and Book Bans – Parent Perception Study from BookRiot and EveryLibrary Institute NFP, released in September, found that 67 percent of those surveyed deemed book banning “a waste of time” and 74 percent agreed or somewhat agreed that bans infringed on their rights as parents to choose books for their children. The latter flies in the face of the common argument from book-banning groups that pulling titles supports parents’ ability to be the arbiter of what their children read.

Roughly two-thirds of the parents surveyed said their child had never checked out a book from a public library that had made them uncomfortable. Yet 49 percent also said librarians should be prosecuted for providing children access to certain books.

That tracks with what happened last month in Hamshire-Fannett school district near the east Texas town of Beaumont. An English teacher has apparently lost her job after she assigned eighth-graders to read a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary.

The book features more passages from the diary than the abridged version many current parents read in school, including sections in which young Anne fantasizes about kissing her female friend and expresses curiosity about the female and male anatomy.

That raised the ire of a parent whose twin boys were in the class. “That’s not okay,” Amy Manuel told news station KFDM-6, which broke the original story, of the passages. The district claimed the book wasn’t approved for use in the classroom, although it was on a reading list sent out earlier in the year. The story made national news, appearing in People magazine and The Washington Post, and even the UK paper The Guardian.

Ari Folman, the artist who created the diary’s graphic adaptation in 2018, said the U.S. is the only place it’s come under fire. Another Texas district and one in Florida have also pulled the book.

“America is the only place where there are issues like this with the diary,” he told NBC News. “Nowhere else.”