Book Marks: More Book Ban News, And A Thriller Trial

While the state of Illinois in the United States has barred the banning of books, the Governor of Texas has signed a bill that bans "sexually explicit" books from schools and "mandates that book vendors rate the content of the books they sell and compile it into a document for review by the Texas Education Agency (TEA)."

The now-codified READER Act — Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources Act — the law means that school librarians have to follow new standards when it comes to purchasing materials for their library.

The writer of the article argues that this bill empowers the Texas governor to determine what gets read in schools, according to what he deems fit. "Let’s not mince words here: this is about Greg Abbott, Jared Patterson, Matt Krause, and other right-wing conservatives determining the lessons allowed in public education and pulling anything that does not align with their repressive, cishet, white male worldview."

And it seems such a worldview has no room for acceptance of diversity. For reading Australian author Scott Stuart's My Shadow is Purple to her class of elementary schoolchildren, schoolteacher Katie Rinderle was terminated by the Cobb County School District in Georgia. Someone complained about the book she had read and though the censorship laws passed last year in the state restricts material deemed harmful to children, nobody seems to be sure what's harmful about the book.

Meanwhile, the Dayton Metro Library is making itself a sanctuary for endangered books "joining more than 2,400 libraries across the United States that seek out books that have been subject to bans or attempted bans, making them available for patrons to check out," according to Dayton Daily News, which also reported that the library's Executive Director Jeffrey Trzeciak said, among other things, "If you don’t like a book, don't read it. It doesn't give you the right to tell others what to read."

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I had opined on Richard North Patterson's problem getting New York publishers to take on his legal thriller The Trial. While an author's race or should not disqualify him from writing about certain topics, Laura Miller over at Slate, who has read the book, thinks race might be less of a factor than the possibility that the book ... might not be great.

Edward Segal over at Forbes sees the controversy over Patterson's book as an opportunity to learn some crisis-management lessons. While I wouldn't call it a controversy, the tips Segal shares would be a good starting point for crafting one's own strategy to deal with being unfairly cancelled.


Elsewhere:

• Children's books featuring neurodiverse protagonists seem to be the latest publishing trend, the Guardian reports. "Publishers, which were previously reluctant to approach the subject, are increasingly seeking out realistic and explicitly neurodiverse protagonists, often by authors who are themselves neurodivergent." One such work might be Free Verse by Sarah Dooley, whose protagonist also has a penchant for poetry.
• Tracy Buchanan at The Bookseller tells people to stop being scared of AI and embrace it, saying that AI can, among other things, help free up time for writers, improve their writing, and aid in the fight against book piracy. Buchanan, like many who believe that the use of AI in writing and publishing is an eventuality, thinks all the negativity in the AI debate is keeping people from writing "bloody good books."
• Some might remember Judy Garland for her role in The Wizard of Oz, but that she published a book of her own poems? "It was 10 pages long and contained eight poems. It first published in 1940 with only a select few copies given out to close friends. Jack Chitgian Bookbinding Service in Beverly Hills, who manufactured the book, reprinted an unknown amount of copies in the early 1970s after Garland’s death."
• A curriculum rationalisation exercise, which also involved edits to school textbooks in India is stirring a pot because of deletions of chapters that make the current Indian government ... uncomfortable. "Among dropped topics are paragraphs on attempts by extreme Hindu nationalists to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi and chapters on federalism and diversity," the BBC reports. Some of the academics who helped develop the existing textbooks are objecting to the changes and want nothing to do with the new curriculum.
• My Kolkata speaks with publisher, poet, photographer and author Naveen Kishore about his book, Mother Muse Quintet, his photography exhibition, and more. "Writing is an independent exercise from publishing. I have been writing for the past 12 years — every day. So, it is a practice, like we do riyaz (systematic practice of an art form, usually under a teacher's guidance) for music."
• The translation of North Korean author Paek Nam Ryong's award-winning novel, Friend, was published in the United States in 2020 by Columbia University Press. But it seems the author was unaware of this, nor did he receive any royalties from sales of this edition.
• The Other Black Girl and the erasure of Black women in publishing: even as publishers ramp up the hiring of BIPOC personnel to boost diversity in the industry, this Electric Literature article argues that such initiatives don't mean that things will get better for BIPOC authors and employees in publishing, not when the same old prejudices persist.
• Out in Kampung Pulau Duyung in Terengganu is a small public library run by 80-year-old Frenchwoman Christine Rohani Longuet, converted from an abandoned village house. Seems running a library has been a dream "of having a cultural centre for young children and explorers". Sounds cool. Wonder if the state government might help out with maintenance and promotion.
• This glimpse into what's going on with the book culture in Uzbekistan suggests things are loooking up after a change of government. But can the momentum be sustained? Can the country shrug off the baggage of its past to allow its reading culture to blossom and thrive?
• A survey of about 2,200 adults in the United Kingdom by the Publishers Association, a UK trade association of publishers, "showed that a third (33%) of people think that books offer them the best form of escapism when they’re having a bad day, coming second only to watching television (54%)." The poll also found that "found that 41% of people keep books for themselves, while 34% pass them on to friends and family members."
• Here's a review of God the Bestseller by Stephen Prothero, a biography of Eugene Exman, an editor of a publishing company that would later be known as HarperCollins. The reviewer calls the book "engrossing", painting a picture of a man who knew that "the dual identities of religious books—as commodities in the market and conduits of the Spirit—are less oppositional than purists of either commerce or ministry might guess."