I wanna talk a moment about how people out here doing the current work standing up against book banning have criticized this statement, I think with justification. King means well, but this is inadequate to the current moment by A LOT.
And I say this with all appreciation for our Uncle Steve, one of my lifelong favorite authors. This encouragement is one that, if he had verbalized it even five years ago, I would simply nod along. Right on! Find your library and read the thing!
But this is not that time.
We're now in a time when what faces school libraries and their boards and administrators, public libraries, booksellers, authors, everyone who works in any way with the written word and published material that children might interact with are facing backlash on a scale too big for King's advice here. In 2018, I faced a single book challenge at the library that employs me. Cost us money to employ our procedures, time, mental health, but ultimately it was one person's complaint about ONE book.
What is now leveled at schools, libraries, booksellers, publishers, writers and more IS NOT THAT. What is happening now is:
*slates of dozens, even hundreds of simultaneous challenges
*organized and systematic protests designed to overwhelm even organizations with solid policies
*attacks designed to end-run established policies, including reporting librarians, teachers and workers to the police and endeavoring to pressure authority figures to overstep established rules to remove materials, all the way up to threatening to jail those who object to their censorship
*drastic efforts to remove materials at a legal level, including efforts to ban the sales and existence of these books in the first place with new redefinitions of obscenity.
And of course:
*a truly staggering focus on items being termed obscene or pornography or objectionable whose content is better simply described as "about BIPOC" or "about LGBTQIA+ folks".
Please understand, this is orders of magnitude bigger than you think. In my fifteen years in libraries, previous years showed (and I'm generalizing broadly) about 250-300 complaints about books nationwide. Total. Not necessarily different titles. If we just look at 2021, there were over a thousand different books under censorship fire, and entire libraries' worth of books in some cases being removed. This is happening to break public education and public libraries, not just remove one book - and it is meant to drive people out of public life who are not white and straight.
You can't just "read the book they don't want you to read", because in Texas alone that's like 800 books at a time. And you cannot count on public libraries and booksellers, because the efforts are happening to deny the ability to even PUBLISH some flavors of content. It is kind of funny in a not-ha-ha way that King is advising this on the very week that some group removed two of his books -- on a list of about two dozen others at one go.
Please, please, I am begging you as a librarian who works with teenagers and sees what's happening every day - look for this in your community and think about how you might respond before "remove the books" becomes "remove the people".
