Questions from National Library Week: Will Libraries Endure? Again with the Gay Penguins?
National Library Week is here again, which brings with it the American Library Association’s annual state-of-the-industry report, as well as the list of the most frequently challenged books. The news from the report is mixed: libraries, eighty-five per cent of which now offer free Internet, are becoming the primary resource for job-seekers and for new-business owners, and they are the last line of defense against book-censorship across the nation. But their budgets were slashed considerably in 2010—resulting in cutbacks in operating hours, staff, and services—second only to maintenance and services at parks and gardens. The report, which you can read on the A.L.A.’s Web site, has a lot of interesting information about the digital revolution: in public libraries, e-books represent a small percentage of borrowed materials, but also the fastest-growing segment; across the country, libraries are “struggling” to adapt to digitization, but are also “envisioning a future that incorporates new philosophies, technologies and spaces.”
What does this mean? It means, as a 2010 report on the twenty-first-century library put it, nothing short of “rethinking the very core of what defines a library—the sense of place, of service, and of community that has characterized the modern library for the last century.” Some of the questions included in the report highlight the extent of the anticipated changes: What will a book look like? Will print-on-demand mitigate the need for stacks? Will books still need to be catalogued? What does it mean for people to “read” text and images in a digital environment? “Will the profession of librarianship endure?”
With so many changes raising so many unanswerable questions this year, it is perhaps comforting that the most-challenged book of 2010 is an old favorite: “And Tango Makes Three,” the picture-book rendering of Central Park’s real-life two-daddy-one-baby penguin family is back on top, after slipping to second place in 2009. I assume there’s a reason it has risen again, but I hesitate to venture a guess. I’ll just say that because the real-life penguin couple has long since headed to splitsville (one of them, Silo, paired off with a female in 2005) I think a sequel—about gay-penguin-parent divorce—is overdue.
Here’s the complete list:
1. “And Tango Makes Three,” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group
2. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Offensive language, Racism, Sex Education, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence
3. “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: Insensitivity, Offensive Language, Racism, Sexually Explicit
4. “Crank,” by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit
5. “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence
6. “Lush,” by Natasha Friend
Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group
7. “What My Mother Doesn’t Know,” by Sonya Sones
Reasons: Sexism, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group
8. “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America,” by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: Drugs, Inaccurate, Offensive Language, Political Viewpoint, Religious Viewpoint
9. “Revolutionary Voices,” edited by Amy Sonnie
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit
10. “Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Religious Viewpoint, Violence
Allison Hoover Bartlett’s 
Some censored gay sex references from the original and never published version of 
