It is absurd to suggest that a restriction or temporary inaccessibility amounts to a ‘ban.’
This week, PEN America announced that 11,982 books were “banned” in public schools during the 2025–26 academic year. As was the case in 2023 and 2025, I have to criticize the flawed methodology in the organization’s annual report: It operates on a ridiculously expansive notion of a “ban,” thereby allowing the “experts” to inflate the total number of supposedly “banned” books.
As it did in previous years, PEN America says the following in its methodology section:
PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content. . . that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished” (emphasis mine).
The organization adds the following:
School book bans take varied forms, and can include prohibitions on books in libraries or classrooms, as well as a range of other restrictions, some of which may be temporary. For example, if a book that was previously available to all now requires parental permission, or is restricted to a higher grade level than educators initially determined, that is a ban.
PEN America also counts a book as “banned” if it was temporarily inaccessible at school:
If a book is challenged and the administration pulls it from the shelves or the school board orders it removed or restricted while under review, then it is counted in the Index as having been Banned Pending Investigation. Even if it is later returned to the shelves, it was effectively banned from students for the period it was under review.
It is absurd to suggest that a restriction or temporary inaccessibility amounts to a “ban.” The reality is that close to zero books are actually banned in the United States; if you can buy a specific book on Amazon and have it delivered to your door the next day, then it isn’t banned — even if your kid can’t check it out from the middle-school library. And, as I’ve noted before, school libraries have limited capacities, so they cannot be expected to carry every single title ever published. Therefore, schools have to make value judgements and discern which books will best serve its students. A book that doesn’t make the cut isn’t “banned,” whether it failed the curatorial process because it was too violent, lacking in educational quality, or something else entirely.
But there’s an especially curious feature in this year’s report: PEN America states that, of the “bans” that occurred in the last academic year, 58 percent were “young adult” and 26 percent were “adult.” There are obviously sound reasons why certain “adult” books shouldn’t be made available to kids; this genre can, and often does, include graphic content involving sexual intimacy, violence, and other mature themes. Moreover, the “young adult” genre is misleadingly named. Although books in this category are advertised as suitable for readers from ages roughly twelve to 18, these works sometimes contain explicit sex scenes (along with other debauchery, like drugs). You don’t have to slog through a young adult romance novel to realize as much. Consider the article in Jericho Writers titled “How to Write Sex for a Young Adult Audience,” which tells authors to “remember that teenage sexual encounters are often awkward” and “conveying this fumbling, nerve-wracking inexperience is important, not just for authenticity, but because many young people use literature as an information source.” There’s a long list on Goodreads titled “Young Adult Fiction With Sex.” (Some people in the comments are arguing about whether each book on the list really belongs; maybe the list isn’t entirely accurate, but it does illustrate the point that “young adult” books are not entirely innocent, and therefore may be justifiably removed from schools.)
We can have productive debates about which books should be made available to children of different ages, but PEN America is preoccupied with producing shoddy analyses through dubious methods as a tactic to smear Republicans. I suppose I’ll keep rehashing these points every year, or at least until someone reasonable begins working on the PEN America research team.