Edit: I mistakenly wrote that The State had written the flags and chosen the books. I have since learned from the February second board meeting that the librarians and the director of the county chose the books and wrote the reasons they were flagged for removal themselves based on the following instructions from The State of Tennessee: follow the Age Appropriateness Act and Trump’s Executive Orders against D.E.I. and against intersex and transgender people. Books were also flagged and removed based on the federal book removals that effected military schools last year, before a judge’s order reversed their removal. I am still unsure of the purpose of some of the reasons the books were flagged, unless they were written as a form of malicious compliance. The librarian’s and the director’s recommendations were to keep all of the books, none-the-less.

Update: On the February 2nd meeting, the council voted to make their own lists and remove whatever they want from those personal lists, going forward.

You can search the document below with the magnifying glass symbol in the upper left-hand corner, and you can zoom in along the top as well. You have to click on the chart for to be able to scroll in it, and click outside of it if you want to scroll the page. Don’t use the search page function on the webpage because it will only search what’s currently readable instead of searching the whole chart. Some fun search suggestions to start with are: muppet babies in disguise, dinosaur on dinosaur violence, and nuts pretending to be human children. The reasons for book removal remain as ridiculous and also get more depressing. (Again, I’m not sure if this is malicious compliance from the librarians or they were so burnt out having to review thousands of books in the course of 60 days that they all became punch drunk).

Below are the original Excel sheets I was given and the Entire PDF document for the Libr Calc. file.

I received the excel file from the RCLS public records provider. If you want, here is the public records request form to fill out to send here (scroll to the bottom of the page). I asked specifically for the list of titles that were removed for the February review.