Thoughts
Tennessee on their way to ban all books
"The only thing that all these banned books have in common is the fact that they’re banned."
Obviously the like Shel Silverstein or Ancient Greek books which have been hit because of non-sexual nudity are bad, but the one that shocks me is Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. Like when you're banning f-ing Sanderson books something's very wrong. Sanderson has never cursed in a book I don't think. Fireflight is a book written by someone with very conservative personal values, with a target audience of middle schoolers. And so it's illustrative that it's not a matter of acting in good faith as an author or sharing values with these people and it's really not about writing books that are appropriate for children. The law is just a checklist of things that you can't talk about. Authoritarianism is fundamentally flawed.
The thing about library-level book bans is that it's not hard to find books that no one has read in a library. People read and focus on the same 2 John Green novels, but weird/explicit material is just as likely to occur in a book from the 80s that someone donated that no one has ever heard of. Unless you have someone read every book with the content standard open next to them, it's just not going to be enforced constantly or completely. There's stuff in the Bible that's much worse than stuff in a Sanderson novel.