On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.

The “banned books” theme has become intentionally vague because it has become a marketing tool.

That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.

That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.

Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.

Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.

However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.

Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.

Is it useful to limit these thoughts to a dictator doing dictator stuff, though? What would be the material difference be between that and operatives of his political party astroturfing local school boards to remove books that teach about the racial history of the country or the existance of trans folk, to make it appear as though the local community decided to do it?

Banning and burning books is from an era when there was no digital publishing. Only way of distributing text/thoughts was by printing press. Today we don't burn books but we constantly ban/shadow ban digital content. This is independent of which country you are from. Corporations do the censorship mostly, in place of the governments. Try writing a Reddit comment opposing mainstream politics. You are only allowed to play in a sandbox. AI shadow-burns your comments automatically and blacklists you if you go out of your human guiderails. No human dictators to blame. So yes, if this is a dictator thing (I think it is), we all live in a kind of modern dictatorship.

I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.

I think it's a little bit naive to think they ignore the association. They know it perfectly well, which is why they are using it. Same thing with concentration camps, same thing with mentions of Gestapo.

Declining to buy and stock a book in a school library is not a ban at all.

The book can still be printed, bought, and read. It can be brought into that same school, and read there. It’s not banned.

They don't ignore it. The conflation is deliberate. Not spending tax money to promote a book to schoolchildren = ban, jailing people for possessing material likely to stir up racial hatred [1] = freedom & democracy.

Sun Tzu did say "appear weak when you are strong".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818766

Came straight to my mind as well. Thanks for sharing. Her music is not my cup a tea but her interest in books seems absolutely genuine.

For anyone with doubts, I insist that you give watching the video a chance.

> The Livraria Lello where this is located, is definitely a bookshop.

And barely a bookshop at that, more of a tourist attraction. You need tickets to enter, and the main selection of books are classics, mainly public domain iirc. They have more recent/interesting books but only as decoration (I asked to buy a Naomi Klein book, they refused to sell it). Most people are just there to take pictures because the stairs inspired Harry Potter.

> more like an art installation

Considering the length of the line to get into that place, I'd wager you're correct.

They wrote: > inside the famed Livraria Lello bookshop

So I think they are aware of the “false friends” words.

With that said, I don’t think it’s an actual library, more like, as you said, an art installation, an exhibition, a space for highlighting books.

It's a book store.

This is wrong, given only the text of the article. The two books explicitly listed are not banned in Portugal or anywhere else. They are simply not subsidized with public money in some libraries.

That makes more sense. How could a library or a bookshop in a location legally offer books that are banned in that location?

They are banned somewhere and the library is open in Portugal.

If they were banned in Portugal it would run afoul of the legal system, and probably be closed down, obviously.

But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.

Though I think there's going to be a lot of garbage, one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican. (along with a bunch more).

Sometimes just seeing what is banned and where is a sort of art in of itself.

Actually the article title is shit clickbait because it IMPLIES those books are banned in Portugal.

The museum is in Portugal. It is not specified where those books are banned.

At least one of those were literally banned back when Portugal was a dictatorship though, which wasn't all that long time ago.

I think though the library is supposed to be a general, worldwide collection of books that were censored/banned anywhere in the world, the physical location of the library just happens to be in Portugal. That's how I understood the article at least.

Isn't it good marketing though? If I'm a young person looking to read something on the edge, maybe it's not banned where I am but if it was banned somewhere else, that's intriguing. If the consequence is more people reading, I would argue it's far from inconsequential.

... I mean, it's in Portugal. Are you expecting Russia or a Florida school board or whatever to bomb it?

I miss the days when words still had meaning

Well, it does kind of matter. "Banned" has a specific meaning. If a book is "banned" and you're allowed to possess it or sell it, it's not really banned, now is it? The usage of the word, despite the reality of the situation, strongly implies "this is a book the government WON'T LET YOU READ!" Except, they do.

A more accurate term might be "politically unfavorable", but that doesn't get people riled up. And, I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but this library is probably zeroing in on books that are politically unfavorable to conservative governments. I doubt we'll find the likes of Mein Kampf in there.

I guess Salman Rushdie nearly did.

https://www.service95.com/manifesto-library-launch looking here, it seems the best case would be Navalny, although he wasn't really killed for his book per se, but rather his political opposition.

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No Eu wide bans, but quite a few in some EU countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...

According to that list, in Germany unannotated editions of Mein Kampf are still banned.

Seeing it in the flesh is the reason why I don't believe too many people actually read the original (and not the abridged version).

It's a brick! And poorly written at that. The man had no talent for the arts.

Wouldn't something like a book of child pornography be banned in the EU?

That's not true at all, for example in Belgium, any book that discredits genocide, incites to racial hatred, or shows sex with minors is banned from sale and/or possession. Then there's also moral rights infringement, such as obscene parodies of Tintin, books explaining suicide methods, etc, etc.

> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.

The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.

However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.

That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”

No non of them are censored in the EU. They are all censored in the US, maybe with the exception of Salman Rushdie.

US book banning is mainly schools and parent groups strong arming libraries and educators to forgo specific books.

The "in Portugal" is, I presume, a statement on where the library is.

Further, when people talk about banned books, they usually mean at some sub-country level, even down to a school board. Like if you look at -

https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/

- these books weren't banned from the United States, but they're controversial enough that individual school boards or library systems removed them.

Not sure if your sarcasm is directed at Dua Lipa for including Atwood, or at the states that actually removed it from their public schools (Texas, Florida, Missouri, among others), but it was actually banned in Portugal during the Salazar regime.

Either way, I agree with your comment that there is nothing dangerous about Atwood unless you are a fan of authoritarian religious governments.

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Yeah, she's really underground. Not many people have heard of her.

They are banned in the US in the same way playboy magazine is, they are not allowed in certain places. Would you say that Playboy Magazine is a banned book becuase its not allowed in schools and prisons?

> ... prevent access to information. ... or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas

Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.

Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)

For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in the author's home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.

The banned book of the TV hit series The Handmaid's Tale. Watch it tonight on Prime Video!

> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)

Handmaid's Tale is actually a pretty decently written book for a dystopia. You just need to like dystopias.

> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)

Weird example. The Handmaid's Tale is quite good.

Edit: wow, downvotes for stating a book is quite good. HN at its worst.

Edit 2: in fact it's so bizarre, also seeing other commenters here downvoted for saying Handmaid is a good book, that I struggled to see the reason for the ire. I'm not from the US, mind you, so it took me a while to add 2 and 2 and remember Atwood and Handmaid are in the current political climate of the US an anti-Trump stance. So that has to be the reason. Saying Handmaid is a good book implies you're anti-Trump and therefore invites downvotes (but also upvotes from the other camp, I'd guess). Wow.

“The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad book” is a wild take to start with.

“I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information.”

You don’t think a school library can prevent access to information? Poor people exist.