Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

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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 […]

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.”

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

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While a lot of writing self-help books are about the basic mechanics and rules of good writing, Mr. Bradbury’s Essays on Creativity are more inspirational. He discusses what he has learned in his fifty years of writing and kindly shares it with us. He doesn’t promote so much as show you the path he’s taken. Of course, since his writing is so stellar, it only makes sense that his How To book would also be well-written and interesting. While he doesn’t make checklists, I do, […]

Fahrenheit 666, or how I learned to start worrying and love the resistance

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 (Double bingo!) It feels like I’m cheating to count this as my banned book “Fahrenheit 451” square, because in the nearly 20 years since I read this the first time it’s become omnipresent. Not that it wasn’t a hit even when I picked it up the first time around in the middle school library where my mom worked, killing time between the end of my school day and her closing hours with an endless supply of books, but the popularity explosion and merchandise inundation really […]

#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 – The Hate U Give

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#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 (one of the ten most banned or challenged books in 2017) Starr feels like she’s living two lives, and in a way she is. She goes to a prestigious private school along with her siblings, where they are among the only black students. She has a white boyfriend, who calls her “Fresh Princess”, thinking she’s a bit like Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She lives in a poor and rough neighbourhood, where drug dealing and gun violence isn’t unusual. Her […]

“It Was A Pleasure To Burn” – Fahrenheit 451

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The kid is in high school now, and although her getting older must mean that I, too, must be getting older (yikes!), there are a few perks. One of them is getting to watch her discover things, like some great books that I read when I was around her age. First up is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian masterpiece. The story of a society, perhaps our own, that has decided that the ideas included in books are dangerous, seems eerily prescient. The floor-to-ceiling view […]

Takes Two to Make a Tango

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This is my Fahrenheit 451. To this day I have a hard time understanding the minds of people who ban and challenge books. You do not like it? Great. There are another 4 billion books out there. Find one you do like. But do not tell me I cannot read a book. Justin Richards, Peter Parnell and Henry Cole came together to make And Tango Makes Three. The story is a true story about two penguins in the New York Central Zoo. These two love […]



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