Books and libraries are in the middle of a culture war in the United States right now; you're living under a rock if you don't know that. Books are being banned in K-12 school libraries all across the country, and they're being banned for increasingly absurd reasons. Parents are concerned that their kids are reading things that rub up against their political beliefs and earnestly believe that parents should have the right to choose what literature is available to the entire school. This conviction and the advocation of said conviction through school boards has led to classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved being banned entirely from certain schools. I think that schools should make books with challenging subject matter available to students because they will never learn if they're not challenged, but that's just me. One school district is even making students get their parent's permission to read a book by an African American author during Black History Month. That's incredibly bleak.
