Books were flagged by librarians for possible violations such as:

“unclothed anthropomorphic animals, violence”

“Adam and Eve nude in the Garden of Eden; Violence”

“underpants shown during cartwheel”

“An image capturing an affectionate gesture where a girl gives a boy a kiss on the cheek on the school bus during Valentine's Day.”

“Fictional male rabbits get married”

“Civil War Hero, Mary, dresses in pants, history of undergarments present and modeled by chickens”

“Kissing”

“Words "ass" appears for donkey and "cock" for rooster”

“2 male neighbors speaking to one another, one has a rainbow and his produce bag”

“LGBTQIA+ rights”

“implied breastfeeding”

“nude mummified body”

“classroom discussion of book bans and censorship”

“discussion of teen getting period”

“woke”

Popular titles flagged and pulled include Aesop’s Fables, two Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne, multiple Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling, and a Charlie Brown book by Charles Schultz.

Archived article link

Hey everyone. Posting this not as a religious post but more about how this relates to book bans. You'll see in the article that they relate this as a possible slippery slope to banning more books that feature languages other than English. Here's the text of article for those who don't want to click:

The Bhagavad Gita As It Is, considered one of the most prevalent editions of the sacred Gita text, has been banned from Florida prison systems since 2022.

By Richa Karmarkar

January 21, 2026

(RNS) — In 2023, Rakesh Patel, an inmate at the Jefferson Correctional Institution in Monticello, Florida, filed several grievances with the state’s Department of Corrections. After 10 years of incarceration, Patel said he was suddenly denied a copy of the Bhagavad Gita As It Is, the English translation and commentary on the central Sanskrit Hindu Scripture by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.

Since April 2022, all copies of the text, considered one of the most prevalent editions of the Gita, have been banned from Florida prison systems. It’s among more than 20,000 books banned by the Department of Corrections’ Literature Review Committee, based in Tallahassee.

“I am being deprive[d] of practicing my religion,” Patel, 58, wrote in his complaints. “This Hindu holy book is no different from Muslims’ holy book of Koran written in Arabic with English translations and the Christian Bible written in Hebrew with English translations. This committee is making a very serious mistake by rejecting this book.”

Patel’s appeal was denied by the FDOC representative, who gave a brief statement saying the Gita As It Is was determined by the Literature Review Committee to be “inadmissible” because it was “written in code” or in “a manner not reasonably subject to interpretation by Department staff as to meaning or intent.” Therefore, the statement said, the book was “detrimental to the safety, security, order or rehabilitative interests” of the facility, or would “create a risk of disorder.”

While the Gita is in Sanskrit, the version in question is translated into English, along with commentary. In his rebuttal, Patel, who was convicted of first-degree attempted murder and is serving a 15-year sentence, wrote, “It is not my fault if the Department’s Literature Review Committee cannot comprehend plain English.”

A cover of “Bhagavad Gita As It Is.” (Courtesy image)

Now, members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness are getting ready to file a religious discrimination lawsuit against the Jefferson Correctional Institute, with Patel, who is on track to be released in October, as a plaintiff. 

“It’s inconceivable that they would ban something like this,” said lawyer David Liberman, also known as Amarendra Dasa as a devotee of ISKCON, one of the lawyers who took on the case pro bono. “It’s a noble, pure type of issue where an inmate, this is his religion. He needs the Bhagavad Gita to further his religious beliefs and his development in Krishna consciousness, and they’re not letting him. It’s just an outrage.”

The ISKCON religious community, with millions of devotees and 800 temples worldwide, is often recognized for distributing books, often in locations such as subway stations, college campuses and airports. Part of the Vaishnava lineage of Hinduism, Hare Krishnas — like the late George Harrison of the Beatles — worship Lord Krishna as the supreme divinity and use the musical chanting of the words Hare Krishna and Hare Rama to connect with the divine. ISKCON also runs what is believed to be the world’s largest vegetarian food aid program and several eco-villages.

And as part of the ISKCON Prison Ministry, devotees have sent thousands of books, CDs,  prayer beads, DVDs and magazines, as well as incense, to prisons and jails in every U.S. state since the 1970s, including 20 other titles by Sri Prabhupada.

Bhakti-Lata Gauthier, the head of the ISKCON Prison Ministry, has witnessed the positive impact of the group’s letters, emails and artwork on inmates, she said. She’s preached to inmates for over 40 years and said 30 to 50 new inmates write to her each month. The group’s outreach has even led to the initiation of new devotees. 

“When they have Krishna consciousness, it changes the way their life is,” she said, recalling how an inmate called his time in solitary confinement “like being in a monastery” and used the time to chant and read, and how a previously violent inmate said he “lost his desire to fight” after reading Prabhupada’s words. “Sometimes it takes some time, but when it hits home, it really hits home.”

For Gauthier, who is French-Canadian and now lives in Alachua, Florida, which has the largest Hare Krishna community in North America, daily interactions with these devotees have impacted her own spiritual life. She said she has found herself praying for the welfare of “Bhakta Richard and Bhakta Gary” in the holy sites of India. 

She shared an excerpt from a letter from Gary W., an inmate in Raiford, Florida, in which he wrote, ”I still don’t know if I’ll get the beads you sent for the second time. I’m chanting on my bootlace though, getting a few rounds in, and mentally chanting all day as I go through my prison routine. When I get out, I want to at least live close to a temple for daily devotional service.”

The Florida Department of Corrections logo. (Image courtesy of FDC)

Liberman, who also lives in Alachua, has been the lawyer on several ISKCON distribution and solicitation cases since he became a devotee in the 1970s, including “cult deprogramming” cases in the 1980s and 1990s, in which devotees who were said to be “brainwashed” were isolated from temples and coerced into renouncing their beliefs, he said. Liberman said he sees similarities between those cases and the upcoming lawsuit, as the “ISKCON’s core beliefs and practices were put on trial.”

And yet, he said, “I would never have believed that there would be a case like this in the 21st century. I didn’t think they did these things anymore, but here we are in North Florida, and sure enough, they’re doing it.”

A 2022 report from the nonprofit Marshall Project found that Florida prisons lead the rest of the country in the number of books banned. From “The Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book” by Matt Groening to books about origami and sign language, the books chosen to be banned seem “futile” to many, Liberman said, including some who argue the prison book bans function alongside Florida’s larger conservative book banning push in the education system.

“The problem here is there’s no specific guidelines that they’re required to follow,” Liberman said. “This regulation, this code as it’s written, it gives them unfettered discretion to pick and choose amongst beliefs and religions, and whatever they want to do — not just religion, but political views, cultural views … there’s no limits. There’s no guidelines or regulations that confine their sphere of authority.”

The Bhagavad Gita As It Is is not the only religious text banned by the Literature Review Committee. Given an almost identical statement from the FDC, the Sabbath Keepers Fellowship, considered the largest Sabbath-keeping prison ministry in the country, was told that its Hebrew study Bible and Freedom Call newsletter were impounded and subject to being banned statewide. 

“We assume this may shortly hold true for any other languages the FDC doesn’t understand, such as Spanish or the (Quran) in Arabic,” said the ministry’s executive director, Lisa Haufler, in a statement on Facebook. “If it doesn’t, it could very well be construed as an antisemitic instance. Anyone in Florida ministry work who uses any form of Hebrew language should be informed that they could be next.”

The Florida Department of Corrections and the Literature Review Committee chief, Melvin Herring, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In a new survey of primary, or elementary, school staff conducted by the UK charity Kindred Squared, the teachers estimated that nearly a third of students in reception class — the equivalent of pre-school in the US — did not know how to correctly use books. At times, some children even tried to swipe or tap the pages like a smartphone.

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Ever read a book that you could tell was doing something interesting or meaningful, but it just didn’t land because of where you were mentally or emotionally at the time?

I’m not talking about books you outright hated, but ones you suspect might have hit very differently if you’d picked them up a few years earlier,or later. Sometimes the timing is off: you’re too close to the subject matter, too burned out, or just not in the right headspace to be open to what the book is asking of you.

For me, one example is The Remains of the Day. I could see how carefully crafted it was, and I understood why people love it, but when I read it I was craving something more immediate and emotionally direct. I walked away appreciating it intellectually, while feeling pretty disconnected from it on a personal level.

I’m curious what books other people feel this way about.

Are there any you plan to revisit someday, hoping they’ll finally click? Or ones you’ve decided were good books… just not for you?

Just thinking about how for me, I could have got into Pratchett's Discworld books long before I actually did, except I got put off by the original cover art featuring half-naked women with their boobs hanging out. The busyness and general weirdness of the art was fine, but I found the oversexualised gratuitous depiction of (some) female characters a mental obstacle. (Also depicting Granny Weatherwax as some old warty crone.) As a teenage girl, this really discouraged me from thinking the books might be for me.

Well over a decade later, I discovered the beautiful, more subtle hardback collectors' editions, gave it a try, and discovered that Terry Pratchett actually writes proper female characters, not just the massive tits depicted on some of the covers. I love the books and collect them now.

What great books did you almost miss out on, and why?

Did the blurb not capture your attention? Did a trusted friend hate it? Did you hate the cover art, or get the wrong impression from it? Did you watch a bad movie/tv adaptation? Were you forced to read a different novel by the same author for school, and figured you'd blacklist the author's entire works?

This is a sort of semi-hypothetical question. It's a real situation I find myself in, but I realize that most people likely don't really realistically have both options, and also there's really no "bad" choice here.

There's this semi-obscure book that I want to read, and it's not available at my local library. In your opinion, is it "better" (for society, I guess) to:

• have a local independent bookstore source it, and purchase it personally from them, OR
• request for your local library to acquire it and add it to their collection

Edit: lots of interesting discussion, thanks all! I thought I'd add a little more context:

• I do support the bookstore quite a bit already - pretty much all of my entertainment reading comes from there. This is an uncommon case in the internet era where I am looking for the book as a nonfiction reference, which is why I thought of the library.
• I've done a little bit of volunteer librarian work, and at that library many of the nonfiction books had literally never been checked out in the internet age, so if someone explicitly requested one (and thereby guaranteed at least one checkout), it was a very strong suggestion for us to acquire it. Also, our local library is surprisingly decently funded, so I think there's a reasonable chance they would get it. But I also think it's pretty likely that I would be the only one to check it out
• As others have said, I think if I donated it to the library, it would most likely end up in their used book sale area, where it would be sold (maybe, eventually) for around $0.50 to $3.00 - in that case I'd rather just keep the book and make a cash donation
• The library would absolutely get it on ILL, it appears to be available in several nearby university libraries. Also the ebook is available for free online. But I prefer the idea of adding a physical copy to "circulation" (I guess my personal collection isn't exactly circulating, per se). But eventually when I need to clear out space, it would end up either in a little free library (there's several in my neighborhood), or sold back to that same indie bookstore (they don't take donations, but they do buy used books they think will sell)

I re-read Guards! Guards! last night and came across this line that so perfectly captures our current zeitgeist, or, rather, I think anyone can read this during any era and can't help but feel a strong connection to it. Pratchett is a genius.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

- Lord Vetinari, Guards! Guards!

The hairs on the back of my neck raised. Even if you're "on the other side", you can just feel it. I can't help but make the connections to what our country is going through (I'm from the US).

No matter "what side" you're on, the world would be a much better place if everyone read.

So many fictional characters are forgettable. Even when a book is good and the author skilled, the characters often feel vivid only while you’re reading and then they quietly fade away...But then some don't!

A friend of mine once went on a rant about The Great Gatsby, which had had read months ago, saying"If Gatsby is so great, why does the book have to be titled that? I mean let readers come to that conclusion naturally." He had a lot more to say, like, Who exactly thinks he’s great, anyway? Nick? Or Gatsby himself, the narcissist who wants to repeat the past, bend reality to his will, and erase anyone who doesn’t fit into his egotistical fantasy? Is it the author, Fitzgerald, who’s in love with his own creation? Or is Fitzgerald actually Nick, and he fell under Gatsby’s spell, or actually Max Gerlach's spell, the real-life figure behind the character?

The more my friend talked, the more pissed off he seemed, so I thought, “You know what? I think Gatsby is living rent free in your head.”

Which character is living in your head these days?

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Every Monday, we will post a calendar with the date and topic of that week's threads and we will update it to include links as those threads go live. All times are Eastern US.

Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay is a quiet, meditative coming-of-age tale unraveling in the midst of a New York snow storm——and the mind of an introspective college girl.

Marin feels both wholly realized and refreshingly incomplete. She‘s still very much at the beginning of her life, but grief tries to hold her back from making meaningful progress in her social life. She‘s got her ceramic bowls and memorized lists of scientific facts and excellent recipes. She’s got a way of pulling in people who are also experiencing their own losses and failures. Part of growing up is learning to let go of the identities and narratives that no longer fit you.

Marin learns that nothing and no one is who she made them out to be. Not the kindly grandpa who practically raised her and stayed in his own lane. Not the best friend she fell for, Mabel, who came looking for closure on the worst night possible. Not the dead mom who can only be understood through strangers’ recollections. Not even Marin herself.

This is a great read for those who wish to identify all the Easter eggs on its lovely cover. It will also strongly resonate with those who feel the world has given them more heartache than they feel prepared to deal with.

This is a great read for life’s fiercest, boundary blurring snow storms.

AMA with Whiti Hereaka author of Kurangaituku on r/bookclub

I DNF Unbound by Tarana Burke. The author really turned me off.

I really really wanted to like this book. I got about halfway through the audio book read by the author, but I couldn't finish it. She was the founder of the Me Too movement. Strike one was when the #metoo hashtag went viral, Burke got super upset and went into a spiral. Why? Because Me Too was her own brand identity regarding survivors of abuse, and when the tag went viral basically she worried that it wouldn't be "her thing" anymore or associated with her. In some part I kinda understand that, she'd been using it for a decade before it went viral, but also, she comes across as kinda selfish for getting so upset about starting a global movement because it got out beyond her ability to monetize.

Second, and probably the worst so far, she describes an event as a teenager where a girl in her friend group slept with her BF and she responded by beating the girl to a bloody mess including smashing her face so badly "a wire from her braces was poking out through her lip"

I get that Burke was likely victimized as a child herself, and has the rest of the book to explain how she grows from this, but this was such a black mark on her character it turned my stomach. It gets worse when Burke explains that the girl she brutalized HADN'T slept with her BF but was quite possibly raped by him!!

Third strike, she describes several accounts of being in school and correcting teachers who are instructing the class on racism in America, basically calling them out for being wrong because Burke knew more about racism than they did and she just seemed very full of herself.

Nobody is perfect, most memoirists smooth over their down flaws, and in some way Burke being open about these things is daringly honest. But holy shit it made me dislike her enough that I don't want to finish the book.

I'm about halfway through this book and am loving it- I love talking about books online and there's usually a reddit thread for whatever book I'm reading- but none for this! How is this possible?

The prose is so funny and I keep reading out sentences to my partner (wanting to put that in italics like our narrator would).

Who do you think the "magazine editor with the child's name" is? Is that Anna Wintour? It is looking like a lot of this book is partially based on Zoe's life, as she studies writing in Oberlin, wrote for Vogue, and lived in NYC and London. Would love to speculate on what may be personal vs invented.

I heard this book is a modern retelling of an Austrian novel called "Woodcutters". Has anybody read both, and how similar is it, other than being a bad, late dinner party that the narrator is ripping apart in their head?

So many funny NYC-isms in here- loved the part about any "real" New Yorker knowing to leave the city in the summer due to the smell ("'Real New Yorkers have been leaving Manhattan every summer since the Dutch or whoever it was landed on the island and started ruining everything''") and the people who can't finagle a place to go have to "pretend suntanning on a fire escape is glamorous".

Also, as a person who studied theatre in school and knows many actresses, the behavior of Rebecca is very very familiar.

Any thoughts?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218460347-the-road-to-tender-hearts

I'm 1/4 through it, and liked it so far. It's about a Vientnam veteren who lost a daughter thus ended in alchoholism, divorce, somehow got the custody of two troubled kids and started a road trip together.

Initially I was appealed by its half-humorous and half-thriller vibe. The first chapter begins with a cat, lingers in a Doctor's office in a nursing home. The doctor, knowing that once the cat lingers in a room then the resident of that room would die soon, gave up the cat in the shelter. The exchange between the doctor and shelter's people, and the cat was quite hilarious.

Pros:

1. It has some Olive Kitterige Vibe, which I like, but it's not THAT enduring

Then it changed to the view of the cat escaping the shelter. Starting the next chapter is the doctor's orbiturary. I was very intriged already when it changed the view to the protagonist, PJ, who was seeing his ex-wife and her current boyfriend off to a trip. Before digging into this charater, the author changed the view again, to one of the kids, witnessing the tension between their parents.

The transitions between the views usually starts with "A put down the newspaper featured by B's news/orbituary" or something like that. This is when I got an Olive Kitteridge vibe, apparently every character in the book lives in the same town, they would eventually meet each other, they just don't know it yet.

In Olive Kitteridge (and other books involved her) there is always an air of "slowly dying". Like everyone is suffering, but no one is taking actions. They just endure, they just hurt, it's subtle but deep. Yet in this one, it's quite different

The author decribed the actions of the characters from a thrid person's perspective, like " He tought someone would...Then he ..." rather than spending some paragragh to describe his actions in detail. Thus the pacing is quite fast, one incident follows the other.

1. It has some genuine, hilairous family moments, which I really appreciate

Needless to say, the conflicts between the kids and their new custodian PJ is gonna be the highlight of the book. I don't have to finish it to know PJ would redeem himslef and get rid of alchoholism after some incidents, and the kids would find themselves healed evetually. But before they got there, their conflict is inevitable.

Where what I'm at so far, PJ has been putting up with kids. He hasn't had a young child for decades, therefore fathering isn't really his strength. There is a piece like this:

Kid 1 was being loud.

PJ said "Kids should be seen not be heard"

Social worker said "that's child abuse"

PJ quickly realized he was wrong and offered Kid 2 a movie he wanted to see

Social worker "that's R-rated, not PG 13"

I can't stop laughing then. PJ is so bad at fathering, and him trying to make effort is so heart-warming.

Cons:

1. I''m currently doubting if I should continue. Spoiler Alert: Some of the incidents felt really forced. PJ is a great uncle of the kids. The kids' late mom in her will made PJ the kids custodian. Yet one of the kid was sexually abused by another male relative. It just sounds off that knowing this, the mother would leave the kids to a distant male relative she hasn't spoken to ever.

I had mostly forgotten I had read this book in my late-ish twenties, and it was only a few days ago, when I randomly chanced on the new TV series and decided to give it a go that I remembered it.

Ah yes, a sleeker, sharper, more unpleasant, less sanitized version of Downton Abbey- the stories of poor little rich aristocratic English girls pursuing relationships, we simply cannot get enough. I remembered the emotions I felt when I first read it, my horror at their upbringing, their messy, messed up lives, the hunt, the charmingness- oh this was not good. These were terrible people, right? Not just Uncle Matthew, but also the younger generation, Fanny and Linda, they were part and parcel of the terribleness of English aristocracy, the blight which fanned and caused misery and destruction in most of the world, including for themselves. Only later I heard the writer's family were Nazi supporters of some kind, and it made sense- not surprising at all.

I mean, it's a fun little book- I never sought out the sequels, because it wasn't actually that good. I can see we were meant to be bowled over by Linda's love of life, her charm, her voracity, her desire for love and well-cut French clothes, and feel that this redeemed the aristocracy somehow. Poor Linda Radlett, how is one ill-fated woman meant to redeem these terrible vicious people? What can dull devoted do-gooding Fanny do? Oh dear. Poor Linda. Poor the rest of us.

The Grolier Club in New York is

one of the world’s most important societies devoted to books. Though it operates as a members-only institution, the club maintains a steady program of free, public exhibitions that draw from its members’ collections. Though often historical, there are fascinating intersections with contemporary culture. Focused on rare books, manuscripts, and literary ephemera, these shows often illuminate how historical texts continue to shape the present.

Take its newest exhibition, Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen, which traces Jane Austen’s quarter-millennium legacy through books, letters, and a wide range of archival material. 

Does anyone else feel that Bangley, Cima, and the rest of the post-apocalyptic crew may all be Hig’s delusions? There is so much emphasis on the impact that the encephalitis had on Hig’s brain function at the beginning of the book and, later on, the lack of clarity between dreams and reality that it makes me wonder.

I wonder if the lack of quotation marks is a nod to the fact that these conversations are not true dialogue, but all figments of Hig’s imagination. Similarly, does the lack of subjects in many of the sentences show that it’s unclear who is doing the actions because, again, it’s all just delusion?

Could it perhaps be that the various people that Bangley/Hig had to kill are all real, and Hig’s psyche invented Bangley as a way of coping with the gruesome murders he had to commit? Could Cima be an invention to help him find comfort and companionship in this bleak and lonely world after the passing of Jasper?