I am late for Banned Books Week, which was October 5-11, 2025. I did start a book that week. I pulled up the most recent banned books list I could find, and went down the list until I hit one that I hadn’t read already and was currently available for digital loan from the library. I ended up choosing Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews.

I understand that most book bans are attempted through school libraries, which is why the list is basically just YA books. However, when going down the list to find a book to read, I was kind of over making myself read a YA book just because it’s one of the most challenged books of the previous year. I have nothing against YA, I do read a fair bit of it but my interest is more in the fantasy genre I suppose. I also read a lot of romance manga, and most of what’s available seems to be focused on high school. It gets a little boring to read about teenagers all the time especially since I’m well past that age.

Anyway, I suppose the point I’m driving at is that I have no idea why this book was challenged so often. There’s no sex scenes, there’s not really any queer characters, nothing all that questionable happened as far as I can recall. The main character is obsessed with remaking movies he gets obsessed over with his friend, and then he’s forced to re-befriend a girl he knew because she’s dying. There’s mentions of drug use, and the main characters have some gross conversations but they’re teenage boys and I’ve heard worse from college students.

That’s the point really. Generally, the people wanting to ban books so badly hardly ever seem to actually read them. There’s all kinds of videos listing out the “reasons” given for various books that get challenged, and a lot of the time half of the reasons don’t even exist in whatever book is being challenged. I also wonder if people watched the movie based on this book and have decided to challenge it based on that. I haven’t seen the movie, so I have no idea what kind of adaptation it is.

Book bans are stupid. At best, they’re silly and at worst they’re about control.