Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My daughter came home from school about a month ago with an assignment that she had to read a classic book of her own choice and then do a project on it. As folks know I look forward to sharing any type of literature with my children so I resolved to help her pick out a story. Wanting to find one that perhaps was not too long, as she has lots of homework, and also a story I had not yet read we chose this Bradbury classic,

Fahrenheit 451 is one of Ray Bradbury's most famous works and upon reading it now it is quite remarkable how prescient it was in many things.

Often taken as a criticism on censorship, it was released during the days of McCarthyism, Bradbury has often said that it was more a treatise on the effects of television on the reading of literature.

In the story we meet Guy Montag a citizen in a future age who is a firefighter. Firefighting is still a revered profession but it has changed dramatically. In this new society firemen start fires, specifically they start fires when they find people with books as books themselves have been outlawed.

Coming home one evening Montag meets a young teenage girl named Clarisse and is instantly struck by how odd she is. Why is she odd? She is odd because she likes to talk, talk about anything, asking questions, asking why things are they are. In the society Montag lives in people no longer do these things. They work and they watch television, television screens being these large monitors which take up whole walls. A special device can be installed on the television so that the home owners name can be used in place of pronouns to make it seem as the characters, referred to as the family, are in the story. If people do not wish to watch television or have deep thoughts they are encouraged to drive, not just drive but drive as fast as they can. In doing this they will be only able to think about keeping the car on the road so they will have no time to think these bewildering thoughts.

In a society where the government does not wish for people to think for themselves one can see why books would be a dangerous item. Montag, over the course of the book comes to question everything. His boss at work Beatty tries to help him see the error of his ways, his wife is very frightened, she would like him to just go back to being like everybody else. Eventually Montag makes a decision that will change his life forever.

As fighter jets fly overhead and wars which last minutes are declared often the society Montag lives in does not accept non comformity and for that he might well pay a heavy price.

In watching this movie a few things strike easily to mind. Our large flat screen televisions now which are in most houses certainly have a similarity to the walls of Bradbury's mention. Certainly a much smaller segment of the population reads now than did in the days before mass media infecting the home. The seashell radio's that Montag's wife has constantly in her ear that play soothing music or calming phrases certainly can remind many parents of the facts that their teenagers cannot appear without an earbud hooked up to themselves.

As I read a section of the story about when Montag was a fugitive and the efforts to capture him played out on live television I could think of nothing so much of the slow speed chase after OJ Simpson that appeared on all our televisions that night in the mid nighties. Many of Bradbury's exaggerations have come to pass. We are an intellectuality lazy society and our government now and our media especially, with it's targeted demographics feeds us information to create the reaction that it wants.

What makes this book so powerful is that the author inevitably wrote a book of mass exaggeration and hyperbole in an attempt to illustrate his point about the dangers of becoming a passive society of watchers. Most frightfully Mr. Bradbury;s books has become the stuff of reality. Scary indeed.

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

After having read several positive reviews of this book I picked it up at the library. In this case the reviews were correct. This is a gem of a book. It defies any normal categorization, touching on the fantasy genres as well as being a riveting example of the conflict between new and ancient technologies.

The books narrator is Clay a twenty something who works the night shift in a very odd bookstore in San Francisco. Describing the bookstore and it's clientele we learn that the few books out front that people might want to buy are just a front for a collection of coded books in the back that are not sold but are loaned out to certain customers. This odd collection of customers appear at the store at odd times of the day hence the need for the store to be twenty four hours.

The book takes off as we begin to meet Clay's circle of friends outside of the store. His roommate and friend Matt who works in set design and most of all his long time friend from grade school Neel. Neel and Clay were nerds together but there paths have diverged, Neel is now tech rich with a company that makes breasts more real life in computer programs. Yes it's true the revenge of the nerds is coming to the world in all of our towns soon.

One evening working, as usual, alone in the store, customer's are usually counted on one hand during a whole shift Clay decides to investigate the books in the back of the store. Books that Clay has been told never to open, never to peruse, only to hand out to the list of approved borrowers.

From there the book takes us down the rabbit hole. We learn about ancient codes and eternal life theories. We visit the vast underground complexes of both a bibliophile cult and the above-ground, miles long, storage facility of overstocked and not on exhibit museum pieces in the Nevada desert.

Along the way Clay's relationship with his new girlfriend Kat, a wholly dedicated employee of the Google empire develops but certainly not in a straight line and his dedication to his employer, Mr. Penumbra, grows with each chapter.

Mr. Penumbra is himself a reminder of the fellowship that this strange bookstore is a front for. With knowledge of the history of the society and a deep seeded belief in the history of the organization he himself gives the book a sense of the mystical.

This is a wonderful little book. I found, as I read it, that it became the most important thing I was reading. I wanted to get to the end, I wanted to know if the code was real. Combining Google magic and the magic of those who created some of the first books six centuries ago with neither suffering for it this book, while hard to classify, will please both those from the Harry Potter school of magic and wizards and those that consider themselves, like me, to be a bit of the Luddite.

A Luddite with a blog that is, I guess we all have our contradictions.

Interestingly about this book, I think it translates well to young readers. My daughter at 13, a huge reader like me, is currently reading Fahrenheit 451, for a class project. I think that this book might be a nice follow up. Both books, in very different ways demonstrate the power of the written word. Not much is more important than that.

I highly recommend this book