In March 2012, the "Knoxville Journal" reported that a parent of a 15-year-old Karns High School student objected to the book's placement on the Honors and Advanced Placement classes' required reading lists for Knox County, Tennessee high schools on the grounds that its sex scene and its use of profanity rendered it pornography. Ultimately, students were kept from reading the novel as a whole, but "Looking for Alaska" was still available in libraries within the district. In May 2012, Sumner County in Tennessee also banned the teaching of "Looking for Alaska". The school's spokesman argued that two pages of the novel included enough explicit content to ban the novel.