Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Book Nerd, a quaint, locally owned literary salon in Castle Hills, kicked off
Banned Books Week Sunday night with a panel of advocates for the right to read.
Every public school librarian in Texas, I learned while attending the discussion, must have two years of full-time classroom teaching experience and earn a master’s degree at an accredited institution of higher learning. They also must complete the state-approved library certification program, passing the requisite educator standards exam.
Before September of last year, librarians held a presumptive defense against potential prosecution if arguably objectionable books found their way onto the shelves. You know, the kinds of materials that include references to “sex, nudity, or excretion” which the elders in the 1980s movie Footloose might deem “harmful to minors.”
Given professional bona fides and valid educational or scientific rationales, Texas librarians long enjoyed the public’s well-deserved trust. However, under Senate Bill 412, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abott last year, any individual — not necessarily a parent — who’s offended by a book can bypass the standard complaint process and report the school librarian directly to law enforcement.
As a result, librarians now face the prospect of police investigation, arrest and a criminal trial over what had previously been regarded as customary curation decisions.
Predictably, this has had a chilling effect.
“Caved to fear” is how Lucy Podmore, a librarian at Tom Clark High School, described the distressing state of affairs at Sunday’s talk. With school budgets increasingly tight, even the most absurd of book challenges place an onerous burden on cash-strapped districts that can ill-afford to risk the potential lawsuit liability.
Podmore also chairs the legislative committee for the Texas Library Association (TLA), the largest such organization in the U.S. “Any library employee or library supporter who knows of a complaint or challenge is encouraged to contact the chair of TLA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee,” the group’s website reads. It also urges those aware of complaints to contact its office at (512) 328-1518 for information on how to contact the current committee chair.
Podmore emphasized the importance of making noise on social media and at hearings of the Texas Legislature. She added that censorship of libraries stood in opposition to parental choice.
“Do not tell me my child can’t access these books,” she said.
What books, specifically, have been targeted recently in the Lone Star State?
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick unveiled his “dirty book list” over the summer, which includes classics such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut along with 21 works by Stephen King, 10 by Augusten Burroughs, four by Haruki Murakami, four by Toni Morrison, four by Thomas Pynchon and one Jane Fonda.
Efforts to censor anti-racist scholars including bell hooks and Ibram X. Kendi, transgender actor Elliot Page and Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg should come as no surprise. More than 100 of the titles on Patrick’s list were notated as flagged by Artificial Intelligence, evidently with no living, breathing reader ever actually reviewing the works in question.
The extreme-right provocateur from whom Patrick copy-pasted his list, Bonnie Wallace of the Christian nationalist pressure group Recover America, recently got herself thrown out of a school board meeting for reading aloud from a Games of Thrones-style romp that’s clearly marked as age-appropriate for students 17 and up.
Luckily for the younger schoolchildren in attendance, she refrained from reciting some of the bluer passages in the King James Bible.
The irony that young adults old enough to enlist in the military can’t check out a book on human anatomy, for instance, wasn’t lost on Book Nerd panelist Ann David, a University of the Incarnate Word educator who’s been active in the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts for more than a decade.
Around 2020, David’s job “stopped being boring,” she said during the panel. That year, hundreds of book removals served as a call for supporters of free speech to circle the wagons.
Things have gotten worse sinse then. During, the 2025-26 school year, some 12,000 books came under bans nationwide, according to the latest numbers from PEN America. Texas alone accounted for 8,193 of those — more than every other state combined.
AI intervention accounts for much of the uptick, David noted, saying the tool has effectively “outsourced oversight to a machine.”
The bans have a trickledown effect on the publishing industry itself, prolific author and poet Rachel Toalson said during Sunday’s event. After all, censorship begets self-censorship.
Toalson, the San Antonio coordinator for Authors Against Book Bans, said publishers are consciously steering away from diversity and inclusion in anticipation of being targeted by right-wing activists. Similarly, library purchases of such materials have plummeted, and curricula have shifted more exclusively to white-dominated literary classics which may fail to engage a diverse student body.
Even though educators have long understood that access to engaging texts is crucial to academic achievement.
Banned Books Week continues with a bevy of non-cost events, including a free screening of Emmy Award-winning documentary The Librarians at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11. That event, hosted by Texas Public Radio and the Office of Mayor Gina Ortiz-Jones, will take place at the Malú and Carlos Alvarez Theater, 100 Auditorium Circle.
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