A Gab Bag Post and Book Review by Laura Madsen, mom and writer
WorldBook Night is a neat organization
that is “spreading the love of reading, from person to person.” It’s about
encouraging people who don’t normally read books—because they’ve never read
books for fun, because they’re incarcerated, or because they can’t afford
books—to try one for free. It is celebrated on April 23, the birth and death
day of William Shakespeare. Twenty thousand volunteers each give out twenty
copies of a book they choose from a list of specially-published paperbacks.
(The authors waive their royalties for the special edition, and the publishers
cover the printing costs.) The book list this year includes old and new,
children’s and adult, fiction and nonfiction, dramatic and comedic, and even
Spanish and large-print versions. On April 23, 2013, volunteers gave out half a
million free books across the United States and another half a million in the
United Kingdom.
I
received a copy of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 from an acquaintance who works
at the King’s English Bookshop, a fantastic
independent bookstore in Salt Lake City. Although I’m not the demographic that
World Book Night is targeting (“light or non-readers”), I happily accepted it
and am reading it. However, I will pass it on to someone else in fulfillment of
its mission.
In Fahrenheit
451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't
put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly
painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal—a
place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. (Amazon)
FAHRENHEIT451 was published in 1953. I recently read H. Beam Piper’s LITTLE FUZZY, a
science fiction novel published in 1962 that’s really showing its age. It’s
like MAD MEN in space: smoking in the office, drinking cocktails before noon,
and having “the girl” (i.e., the secretary) place your calls. While LITTLE
FUZZY is very dated, FAHRENHEIT 451 is still quite relevant today.
The title
refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire: 451 degrees. The main
character is Guy Montag. He’s a fireman—but not the job we think of when we
think of firefighters. In Bradbury’s dystopic future, firemen ignite fires to
burn books, which have been universally banned. However, Montag is intrigued by
books and hides one in his jacket at a burning.
Montag’s
fire chief explains how the burning started: “Films and radios, magazines,
books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm. Out of the nursery into the
college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past
five centuries or more. Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping
hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off
all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! School is shortened, discipline relaxed,
philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually
gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored.” One wonders if Ray
Bradbury was psychic to foresee Facebook, Twitter and text-speak!
The chief
continues: “But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the
comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. With
school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers,
snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and
imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word
it deserved to be.” Books, being intellectual, are burned. So too is anything
that offends anyone; any book that might upset a minority group is burned.
“Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette
people are weeping? Burn the book.”
And: “If
you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a
question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. We [firemen]
stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with
conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady.
Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.”
Does this
sound like our world sixty years after the book was published? For many
Americans, the extent of their knowledge-seeking in a day is to check Facebook,
click “Like” on silly kitty photos, respond to the posts of strangers with
grammatically incorrect vitriol, tweet the inane details of their life to other
strangers, and carry on. They ignore world news, disregard anything that might
challenge their way of thinking, and reduce philosophical and political
discussion to forgettable memes. Would those people miss anything if every
single copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was burned? Would they even notice? The only
difference between today and Bradbury’s world are that we ourselves—not the
government—are cutting off the “torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy”
that might make us think.
Books and
knowledge and thinking are what World Book Night and FAHRENHEIT 451 are all
about.
Market:
adult fiction (dystopian/ science fiction)
Violence:
moderate to high
Sensuality:
minimal
Language:
mild
Adult
themes: book burning, arson, murder, betrayal, government oppression,
censorship, revolution
What are YOUR thoughts on this topic?