Orlando Sentinel
Leslie Postal
12/20/2023
A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.
The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.
The books run the gamut, from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem “Paradise Lost” to John Grisham’s 1991 New York Times bestseller “The Firm.” John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” made the list, too.
The list also includes popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd and Jodi Picoult, classics like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Jude the Obscure,” and “Madame Bovary,” and award-winning books like “A Thousand Acres,” “Beloved,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”