This Is Why We Opened A Banned Books Library (In Rural Texas)

One of my kids’ favorite books is I Need a New Butt . I don’t want to spoil the plot, but he needs a new butt not for any culture-war reason but because his has a crack in it . That’s funny, especially if you’re four or five or six or seven. My boys love the sequels too, I Broke My Butt! and My Butt Is So Noisy! , which I’ve read to them many, many times. They’re funny and silly and ridiculous and creative. And they do what good children’s books are supposed to do: they help kids develop a love of books. Back in 2022, an assistant principal in Mississippi named Toby Price read I Need a New Butt! to a group of second graders. Then—gasp—some of the kids started saying the word “butt” a lot. So Price was fired. Seriously. He sued for wrongful termination. He spent a fortune on legal fees. The school district spent a fortune on legal fees. Eventually, he won and was reinstated. Everyone lost, including the taxpayers and the kids. As Price put it, “If you limit the books kids have, you limit the person they become.” And this wasn’t some isolated bit of insanity. A little more than an hour from where we live in Texas, some crazy people in Llano County became fixated on getting the Butt books removed from the public library, calling them “grooming stuff.” The campaign spread, more books disappeared, and a librarian who resisted what was happening was eventually fired. Hitting even closer to home, the high school my sons are likely to go to here in Bastrop was in the news not long ago for challenging a book called Out of Darkness , about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out , the school doesn’t even carry that book. The mother had confused it with another book literally about a boy who mows lawns. So I get a little frustrated when I see people say that book banning isn’t a real thing. The whole point of school—and libraries—should be introducing kids to books that make them laugh, make them think, and show them that books can be provocative and transgressive and interesting and creative. This is exactly what I was going to say when I was supposed to speak at the U.S. Naval Academy last year. If you remember, my talk was cancelled moments before I went on stage because I was going to address the fact that the Academy—at the direction of the president and Secretary of Defense—had removed hundreds of books from its library for being “too woke.” ( I wrote a whole NYT article about it ). These are our warriors and they’re being told what books they can and can’t check out from a library? Again, this is why I get upset when people say book banning isn’t real. The degree to which people will do mental gymnastics not to face this is crazy. Oh, it’s not a ban if they are just restricting access. Oh, it’s not censorship, they are just making sure it doesn’t get in the wrong hands (Sir, you’ve just described censorship). Apparently, if a book is available anywhere, it’s not actually banned? Tell that to the librarian who got fired. Tell that to all the educators being threatened with fines or even prison time for giving students access to certain books. In the antebellum South, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned and criminalized. The fact that you could still buy it in Boston doesn’t cancel that out. When the Catholic Church banned—and burned—books, was it not a big deal because there were still Protestant countries? With this deranged campaign spreading through schools and libraries around us, I started thinking about what I might be able to do about it. We’ve had this extra space in the building next door to The Painted Porch that we’d been trying to figure out what to do with for a while. Well, we figured it out. We turned it into a free lending library for banned books . After months of planning, designing, collecting books, and building the space out, the Banned Books Library opened a few weeks ago. My hope is that it can serve as one small counterblow against this deranged book-banning impulse spreading across the country. Every book in the library has been banned or challenged somewhere. Some were removed by school boards. Some were outlawed by governments, burned by mobs, denounced by churches, dropped by publishers, or struck from the shelves of libraries, universities, and military academies. Some are great books. Some are strange books. Some contain ideas I agree with. Some contain ideas I don’t. That’s the point. A library is not an endorsement of every book inside it. Reading something is not the same as agreeing with it. Like many public school kids, I was assigned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, rereading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury was depicting something much more insidious. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen it. One group didn’t like one book. Another group didn’t feel good about another. So burn it. Make everyone comfortable. Bradbury’s message is a much more salient warning to modern Americans than many of us are ready for upon first reading. America is, and always has been, in less danger of top-down Chinese- or Soviet-style suppression and much more vulnerable to short-sighted or even well-intentioned democratic censorship. People are willing to ban a book because of what they think might be in it, or because of what someone else said was in it. It’s almost beyond irony that that book itself has been challenged or banned in some schools. But that’s no more ironic than the fact that in 2024, the ACLU had to file a lawsuit to restore access to 1984 in a Colorado school district. Look, reading something is not the same thing as endorsing it. You can wrestle with a book. Challenge it. Disagree with it. Learn from it. In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he later recalled, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.” A few years later, Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war. “In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” he explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’” Reading Marx and Lenin didn’t make Stockdale a Marxist. It helped him understand and resist his captors. Interacting with stuff that challenges you or that provokes you either opens your mind or it serves as an inoculation…Both those things are good. That was going to be my message to the Naval Academy, but it’s one everyone needs to remember. America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time partisan news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We read only things that confirm what we already believe. If you’d like to be part of the solution, you can donate a book by sending one to the Banned Books Library (912 Main St., Bastrop, TX) or through thepaintedporch.com/banned . And if you happen to be in the area, come by, take one home, and read it. Wherever you are, find out what books people are trying to remove and read them. As Stephen King has said, “Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.” In a time of misinformation and disinformation, that quote might not always be right, but directionally the argument is good. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain. Read dangerously. Read what they’d rather you not see, not know, not think. Wrestle with it. Challenge and disagree with it. And, above all, learn from it.