I’m glad my kiddo had the occasion to read this book for school which nudged me to revisit it! I owned a copy (which I think is now battered at the bottom of his backpack) but nothing beats telling your kid, “Oh? What book? Yeah, we have that one.”
I can’t imagine a summary of this classic is needed, buuut just in case, Bradbury basically foretold the future in that his novel is in a future world where books are outlawed and firemen, instead of fighting fires, are tasked with starting them to burn any books that are discovered. People spend their days indoors absorbing insipid televised entertainment on giant screens, and their nights with earbuds in their ears. So farfetched! (Cough).
This book is commonly known to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship, but per Bradbury, that’s not what it was about (check out the link/recording below to hear it in his own words!)
“Fahrenheit is not about censorship, it’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids of all the popular programs on TV, the competition programs, they give you factoids.”
“I wasn’t worried about freedom. I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV. We’ve never had censorship in this country, we’ve never burned books…”
Ray, I got some bad updates for ya about present times but, his almost blase attitude has a point in that the level of censorship in this country is nowhere near what is experienced in other places. So that’s something I guess?
I saw a “funny” thing on Instagram the other day, a snippet that said, “I reward myself for spending all day on my medium screen by scrolling on my small screen while watching my big screen.” And there it is, our present reality summed up. That gave me a smirk and a grimace, so I’m going to be sure to keep spending quality time with my paper books (She says, while typing this on her medium screen. Sigh).