Culture Talk

Banned Books Week just passed and my library's display started a fight at dinner

My local library in Chicago did its usual early-October display of challenged books. Mostly classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Beloved, a couple of Harry Potters, and some newer YA titles.

My uncle's position at dinner was that 'challenged' isn't 'banned', and parents asking a school to remove a book is just parents doing their job. My position, as a lawyer and as someone who annoyingly enjoys this stuff, is that the distinction matters legally but less in practice if a kid simply can't find the book anywhere in their school.

I don't want this to turn into a US culture war thread. I'm more interested in how other countries handle it. Who decides what's on a school reading list where you live, and do people fight about it?