I am dubious about the value of the current fad for citywide reading programs. But at least this year's selection for Books on the Bayou: Houston Reads Together, is a worthy title: "Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury. (If you haven't read it, find a copy today and get going. It is prescient and you're late.)
The Houston Chronicle, one of the main sponsors of Houston's reading program, has a pretty good article today, including this nugget:
One of Bradbury's chief inspirations for the book came when, as a teenager, he viewed newsreel footage of Nazis torching books in Berlin. Yet its theme had percolated in his mind for years."My love of libraries goes back to when I was 8 years old," Bradbury, 83, said. "I've grown up with libraries and books. All the women in my life were librarians, teachers or booksellers. I met my wife, Marguerite, in a bookstore. Libraries have been a constant, from grammar school through high school, and since I couldn't afford to go to college, I spent three years educating myself at libraries."
The destruction of books blazed in Bradbury's imagination. "To me," Bradbury says, "burning books is a terrible blasphemy, the worst sin that could be committed."
A better article by John J. Miller appeared in OpinionJournal last May to mark the 50th anniversary of the book's publication.
Mr. Bradbury has written some 30 books, more than 600 short stories, and countless numbers of poems, essays and screenplays. Even as an octogenarian, he gets up every morning and spends a few hours composing. His most recent novel, "Let's All Kill Constance," came out in January to mixed reviews. A new collection of 100 short stories is slated for release in August.Posted by Alan at September 4, 2003 06:08 AMAmid this prodigious output, "Fahrenheit 451" is the book for which Mr. Bradbury will be best remembered. Perhaps that's because the concept is so unforgettable: In the near future, firemen don't put out fires; they start them instead. Books have been outlawed. When they're discovered, first responders hurry to the scene. The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns.
One of the paradoxes of science fiction--and a fact poorly understood by many people who don't read it--is that much of the genre displays deep doubts about the future. Some of the finest books in the field, from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to William Gibson's "Neuromancer," regard technology as dangerous and dehumanizing.
"Fahrenheit 451" falls squarely into this dystopian tradition. Kingsley Amis said of it: "Bradbury's is the most skillfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells."
Mr. Bradbury insists that the purpose of "Fahrenheit 451" was not to prophesy. "I wasn't trying to predict the future," he says. "I was trying to prevent it."
Today, Mr. Bradbury is more concerned with another problem that he thinks he didn't prevent. "There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them," he says. "The education system in this country is just terrible, and we're not doing anything about it."
One of the often-overlooked details of "Fahrenheit 451" is that the censorship Mr. Bradbury describes was not imposed from the top by a ruthless government. Rather, it seeped up from the indifferent masses. As a villain explains: "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. . . . No wonder books stopped selling."
Only part of that speech captures our world now, because books haven't stopped selling. Mr. Bradbury, however, finds many of the latest ones worthless. He spends his free time reading the plays of Shaw and the poetry of Pope. "I'm learning from the past," he says. "Few modern novelists teach me anything."