The Book Banning Bill That Won’t Die
What looked like political theater is becoming a genuine threat to the freedom to read.
Back in March, I regarded H.R. 7661 — a national book-banning bill titled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” — as dangerous but politically unserious. After all, Congress is designed to thwart rashness, to subject outrageous proposals to serious scrutiny, to allow bad ideas to fail like seeds sown on rocky soil.
Election denier Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) had introduced her legislation to strip federal funds from public classrooms and school libraries that contain “sexually oriented material.” It was a clear case of moral panic devised to subvert the judgment of teachers and librarians, who have long demonstrated their ability to select appropriate books for students without federal micromanagement.
And besides, I thought, a large majority of Americans have consistently opposed book banning. Surely, Rep. Miller’s effort to project her mania across the country would drown in its own tangled mess of First Amendment contortions and Puritanical horrors, such as the bill’s ban on depictions of “lascivious dancing.”
I assumed Congress would do what it has traditionally done with performative culture-war proposals: let it expire.
I no longer believe that.
The reasonable forces that would once have snuffed out H.R. 7661 have been overwhelmed by a wave of toxic initiatives, scandals, and crises. Suddenly, that little patch of black mold in the basement has spread throughout the house. And the House.
Since its introduction, Rep. Miller’s bill has attracted the support of more Republicans. In June, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) introduced a parallel bill in the Senate. Earlier this month, H.R. 7661 was formally reported to the full House with a recommendation that it pass.
Both the House bill and the new Senate bill define acceptable works of literature by referring to reading lists from Compass Classroom, a publisher for evangelical Christian homeschoolers.
Tellingly, Compass Classroom’s list of “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” does not name a single Black, Latino, Asian, or Indigenous author.
As for Frederick Douglass, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison?
Well, let’s just say we know who’s dancing lasciviously.
The last thing schools across our country need is a wave of federal court cases brought by well-organized fanatics juiced up on dirty passages of Slaughterhouse-Five that they pass from district to district with the fervor of eighth-grade boys swapping a tattered copy of Playboy.
The American Library Association recently asked everyone who cares about books and our literary freedom to tell their senators they oppose S. 4925.
“It’s ideological grandstanding and political overreach, pure and simple. This type of fear-mongering and censorship can’t become law,” the ALA statement said.
“The bill is dangerously broad, withholding critical school funding for the mere mention of transgender people or nudity. Such a sweeping prohibition threatens health, art, and science education.” (Speaking of science, Compass Classroom also offers several books promoting so-called creation science and intelligent design.)
Given the Supreme Court’s growing enthusiasm for Christian nationalism, there’s a chance Rep. Miller’s theocratic crusade could survive judicial review.
All kinds of terrible things we couldn’t have imagined happening 10 years ago are happening. This censorious legislation shouldn’t usher in the next one.
P.S. Bravo to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who recently vetoed a book-banning bill for the second time. Live Free or Die Without Books.◆
The rest of the newsletter follows below.
Books Go to the Movies
These days, booksellers on TV either solve murders (Bookish) or commit them (You). So I have high hopes for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, a new sci-fi comedy series on HBO Max. It’s about a comic-book store owner who accidentally triggers a multiverse Armageddon. Fans of The Big Bang Theory will feel right at home.
“Love is a canyon that feels impossible to cross,” says Patricia Clarkson in the second season of Ransom Canyon, which rode onto Netflix last night (trailer). This hot-n’-dusty TV show is based on Jodi Thomas’s Ransom Canyon series of eight Western romance novels that started heating up the Texas plains in 2015.
The Twisted Childhood Universe, a series of gory movies devoted to the desecration of children’s classics, continues this week with Pinocchio Unstrung, based on Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel. (I’m guessing most of you missed Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey). This time around, Richard Brake plays Geppetto, a woodcarver who creates a homicidal puppet that uses its long nose to impale people. (No, I’m not lying.) Alas, Jiminy Cricket is voiced by Robert Englund, best known for playing Freddy Krueger — not exactly the guide anybody’s conscience needs.◆
The Sirens Are Calling All Book Lovers
With the world newly obsessed with a certain hero from Ithaca, Odyssey translator Emily Wilson should be mobbed at the National Book Festival in Washington next month.
Other equally popular authors scheduled to appear include Ann Patchett, Patrick Radden Keefe, Andrew Sean Greer, Karin Slaughter, and Tayari Jones. All told, more than 80 writers and illustrators will be on hand.
To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, this year’s festival will include extended programming on literature, history, music, film, folklife, and more.
Actress Cynthia Erivo will talk about her work and her new memoir Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They’re Too Much.
Martin Scorsese will discuss his career in moviemaking and the Library’s role in preserving films.
This is your chance to hear historians Douglas Brinkley and Annette Gordon-Reed in person.
U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze will explore the art of translation.
I’ll be talking with Sasha Waters about her upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.
Plenty of authors and illustrators for young adults and children will be on hand, too. Full list of authors here.
The Library of Congress National Book Festival is on Saturday, Aug. 22, at the Washington Convention Center.
As always, the festival is free and open to the public. BUT WAIT — NEW THIS YEAR: Free tickets are required to enter the festival. Reserve yours here.
If you can’t make it to Washington, you can watch many of the events livestreamed on the Library’s website. (Eventually, all the events will be posted there and on YouTube.)
To pull off this mammoth festival, the Library of Congress needs hundreds of helpful volunteers. Interested? Learn more.
I hope to see you there. I’ll be the one carrying a book tote.◆
Postmarked
Cork is so central to Portugal’s heritage that the Portuguese even make postcards out of it. While staying in Lisbon last month, I sent several cork missives back to the States using stamps featuring pastéis de nata. (If yours hasn’t arrived yet, be patient; I’m told the international mail is slow.)
Alas, the act of sending postcards is going the way of clipping coupons and reading newspapers. A new study in Britain finds that just 16 percent of adults send a few postcards every year; more than half never send one.
Against the relentless onslaught of email and apathy, English Heritage, the UK’s leading historic preservation organization, is determined to keep those brief notes sailing through the mail. Wisely, they’re starting with children before Snapchat has zapped their fondness for real correspondence.
At more than a dozen historic sites across England, kids can now pick up free postcards designed by children’s illustrators Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake.
“At English Heritage we believe the postcard deserves more than a place in the nostalgia tin — it’s a living tradition worth preserving,” a spokesman said in a statement announcing this new program.
Sir Quentin, 93, added, “There’s no better way to put a smile on someone’s face than with a postcard.” There may, in fact, be better ways, but there is possibly no cheaper way.
An inveterate postcard sender, I’m currently working through my second box of World’s Greatest Bookstores, designed by Bob Eckstein (Clarkson Potter).
P.S. In my final months at The Washington Post, someone sent me a story on postcards. They arrived out of order, some disappeared in transit, and I never learned who the author was. If you’re out there, please reveal yourself.◆
Picture This
The Knight With No Bottom starts at the end, so to speak.
In the heat of battle, a dragon took a bite...
and now our brave fellow is a bottomless knight.
Butt won’t this corrupt our youth?
Flush the prudes away! This hilariously silly picture book by Dutch writer Levina van Teunenbroek should be wedged right between Captain Underpants and Everybody Poops.
From the moment our gallant knight loses his derriere, he sets about on a quest for a bulbous replacement — a Holy Pale, if you will.
“Bereft and bumless,” he discovers “a shop for bottoms” in all sizes and colors. Restored, he woos a princess he’s long adored.
They went out boating and had such fun;
the day was full of laughter.
She didn’t care if he could ride;
It was his humor she was after.
Anyone else after humor will giggle along with this cheeky book, which has sold more than 50,000 copies in Europe.
Charlotte Bruijn’s illustrations are a subversive blend of goofy and pastoral, with just enough butt showing to send Moms for Liberty farting away to their legislators.
The double-spread Bum Shop is a thing of wonder.◆
This Week’s Poem
Sarah Hanson opens her new collection, Conjuring the Hurricane, with a poem titled “My Father’s Anger.” Cruel and narcissistic, he was a man whose mood served as “a thermostat nobody could regulate.”
By the account of these devastating poems, his home was designed to crush a young woman.
In a poem called “PTSD,” Hanson writes, “I can’t seem to heal / no matter how many skins I shed.”
But what’s so exhilarating about reading this brave, tender collection straight through is watching her attain that healing, that sanctuary, that joy that eluded her for so long.
“I am learning,” she writes near the end, “how to tell a hard / truth gently.”
Print this poem out and keep it somewhere you can find it when you need it.
On Impermanence
I can only tell you what I know:
there will be good days, when the sun
splashes on your upturned face
and washes over you, when laughter
bubbles out of you, when you lean
back in contentment and murmur,
Isn’t this lovely? because nothing
has ever, in fact, been lovelier.
There will be days when all of that feels
so far away, you couldn’t reach
for it or remember it if you tried.
You can almost convince yourself
it never happened, not to you who is currently
so bereft and alone, becoming one
with your blanket and bedsheets as you try
to dig one single lovely thought from the emotional
rubble. Sometimes a bunch get strung together,
which can trick you into thinking that whichever version
you are in, the good or the bad, the sun-
shine or the long shadow, it’s permanent.
I promise you it isn’t. Both days come, and both days go.
And depending on which kind of day
I’m having, this truth fills me with either aching
nostalgia for the moments I am already starting
to miss, or knee-buckling relief as I steer
the darkness into my rearview again.
The best and worst days both end.
The sadness and relief of this holy
impermanence is one of the sacred truths
I breathe into, and whisper Thank you as I exhale.
Excerpted from “Conjuring the Hurricane.” Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Hanson. Published by Inked Elephant Publishing House. Reprinted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.◆
Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
Last week, while visiting our elder daughter in Santa Clara, Calif., I overheard a bookseller at Books Inc. say he was retiring.
In fact, everyone in the store heard him.
Doug Stocks is not the fading, whispering figure of some dusty Masterpiece Theatre bookseller. He’s a tall guy with a big, gray beard, somewhere between a happy Hemingway and an off-season Santa — and around here, more famous than either one.
Doug is retiring next month after 48 years. “I’m the longest-standing bookseller in Silicon Valley,” he told me. It’s been the only job he’s ever had. “Since I was 18 years old! Can you believe it? Books, Inc., oldest bookseller west of the Mississippi, publisher of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte.”
For a moment, I think he’s going to tell me about meeting them, but he has more contemporary tales to spin.
He once helped Steve Martin find a book about how to pick up girls. “I thought it was just a kind of gag,” Doug says, “but two years later, he came out with his first novel, Shopgirl. You remember the character that read these self-help books on picking up women? Yeah, he was doing research for one of his characters.”
Doug sometimes waited on the comedian Red Skelton, who used to sell his own clown plates at a shop across the street. “He came over to the bookstore, and he’s like 6-foot-5 — a monster character, fur coat in the middle of summer — and he had two guys bigger than him as bodyguards.”
“Clowns,” Doug adds wistfully. “Totally makes sense.”
He confesses that he sometimes entertained celebrities unawares.
Once he spent about an hour with a guy who was buying a stack of books for his sister’s birthday, including a large-format catalog to a fashion show at the San Francisco Museum of Art. “It was like all the bell bottoms and all the hippy shit that was going on back in the day. Beautiful book.”
“I actually accused him of being someone I knew from the train,” Doug says. “He had that look on his face: Uh-oh, he realized who I was. And then he was like, ‘Nope, that’s not me.’”
Only after the customer walked out the door did Doug look at the receipt and realize it was Johnny Depp. “That was hilarious.”
As I’m leaving, Doug asks, “Do I know you? Are you famous?”
“No,” I say. “For years, I reviewed books for The Washington Post.”
“A formerly great newspaper,” he says.
Sigh.
“I got laid off in February.”
“Yikes,” he says. “So, are you working?”
“I switched over to Substack. Now, I review books there.”
“Yeah, you were the book review guy,” he says, either remembering or humoring me. “We have few of those left.”
He laments what’s happened to book coverage at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. “I mean, they do some reviews, but they don’t have a focus.”
When I ask Doug what he plans to do in retirement, he says, “Sit around in my underwear and drink beer.”
I don’t believe him.◆
Clippings
This week’s review is Cool Machine, the witty and surprisingly moving conclusion to Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy (review).
The Frozen People, by Elly Griffiths, was named the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year last night in Harrogate, England. The prize, worth about $4,000, recognizes the finest crime novel by a UK or Irish author published in paperback.
The man convicted of trying to murder Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in 2022 is being tried on federal terrorism charges in a Buffalo courtroom (AP). ◆
Thanks for keeping the Christian nationalist attack (yeah, I'm mad) on our teachers, school librarians, & kids front of mind. We gotta stay strong. You're showing us how.
Unfortunately most Americans forget causes that have moved beyond their ability to generate headlines. We cannot rest on things like this!