“Banned Books Week” has become a joke. I call it “bland books week.” Its definition of “banned” includes being deemed inappropriate for elementary school libraries. This is at best deceptive, and it’s an excuse for not talking about books that face actual efforts to ban them. The list also includes “challenged” books; that means simply that somebody asked a library not to carry a book. Talking about real banned books would require entering real controversies.

Unless you think school libraries should carry everything down to and including hard porn, “banning” in that sense is justified in some cases. “Challenging” hardly deserves notice at all, unless it results in serious consideration of excluding a book. Whether a school library carries Captain Underpants or not isn’t an issue of freedom of the press. Whether a book can be published at all is. There are books which have actually been banned in recent US history.
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