Bannable Books: all of them?

the literary world is both more and less shocking than some might think

I can't tell you the number of times Shiver's place in public libraries has been challenged this year.

The latest: Kentuckians Challenged 395 Books.

Believe it or not, I was a strict parent (my urchins are now 19 and 20 years old), and I made myself quite aware of the media my kids were putting in their eyes. I didn't have to nose in to every corner of their world, but books are a way to explore the world, and I wanted to know what metaphorical territories they were wandering into, just as I did in the real world. Knowing where they were at meant we could have good conversations (not just meaningful conversations, too, but interesting and friendly ones; being aware of what your kid is doing isn't just about being a watchdog).

And yet I have no respect for these lists of challenged titles, because Shiver is the only one of my books that ever appears in them, alongside the exact same offenders that appeared in a well-publicized challenge a few years ago. It's the same strange collection of titles, much of it with disingenuous labeling (repeatedly, adult titles on the list are called 'young adult' to incorrectly imply that publishers directed the content at teens). This list is not the product of well-meaning and invested parents taking a look at content and asking for it to be moved to a different age range, but rather a pre-packaged list of offensive books that's clearly still circulating some dismal corner of the internet.

But the list is notable to me less for the books that are on it than the books that are not.

Shiver's sequels, Linger and Forever, with identical content, never appear alongside Shiver. The Raven Cycle, a crunchy series with self-harm references, never appears in this pre-packaged list. No. It's Shiver, the least-sweary and most fade-to-black of anything I've done, because it somehow got bundled into the original starter pack of 'Books to Be Alarmed About'.

This is the thing that bothers me the most about this list. It is not a reasoned list. It's too small. If the principles inside Shiver bothered them, they have a lot more books to add to the list. Add the principles of the rest of the list, and crazy things not even mentioned in any of the books on the list — well, heck. A list of books with eyebrow-raising material would not 395 books long. It would be hundreds of thousands of books long, because books simply reflect the world we're in: there's thousands of books for every mindset you can imagine. You can't build a fence to keep other people's principles out; you have to just build your own principles from the inside out. This is just called being alive!

I wish there was some way to counter this culture of fear. I'd tell them: guys, there is both better and worse than what you're fearing inside libraries. And in the houses next door to you. And in your own family. You aren't changing anything by making librarians' lives difficult; you're just making a lot of paperwork and perpetrating a culture of shame.

But they aren't asking me. Just copy-pasting my name into the list again and again.