Banned Book-of-the-Month Club presents: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Each September, libraries observe Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom to read. How about the rest of the year? Welcome to Shelf Talk’s Banned Book-of-the-Month Club! Our inaugural selection is a novel about banning books: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Why read banned or challenged books? Yes, to affirm your right to read and think as you please, but the best reason is that banned books are consistently interesting and provocative, and Fahrenheit 451 is no exception. There’s a great pulpy angst to this 1953 novel its Twilight Zone twist of firemen who burn books with flamethrowers, inspired by Bradbury’s own love of libraries, his horror at seeing filmreels of Nazi book burnings, and his growing concern over McCarthyism. Yet the book’s most disturbing moral for our society today may be what poet Joseph Brodsky was talking about when he wrote: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” For Bradbury warns not just of the villainy of censors, but of the tyranny of the mass marketplace.

Did Bradbury anticipate our own twittering, Googling world when he wrote about the degradation of books into smaller and smaller bites of information, “leveled down to a sort of paste-pudding norm” by “publishers, exploiters, broadcasters” who “whirl man’s mind around about so fast … that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought”? Are we losing our literacy to “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk,” the sound of a “gibbering pack of tree apes that [say] nothing, nothing, nothing and [say] it loud, loud, loud,” via ubiquitous  “electronic bees”? I love my iPod and my TV shows, and I’m not sure I agree that the onslaught of mass media will “skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy” books until “every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resemble[s] every other story… Every image that demand[s] so much as one instant’s attention–shot dead.” Yet amidst declining literacy statistics and shortening attention spans, the thought gives me pause, even more than the thought of overt censorship and burning books.

Of course, Fahrenheit 451 could not be our banned book of the month if it had not experienced its share of challenges as well, and it has. But the most unsettling aspect of all is not any attempts to keep you from reading the book, but rather that – unbeknownst to you –  the copy you read in school may have been sanitized for your protection. For the first thirty years of its publication, many school editions of Fahrenheit 451 contained scores of expurgations and bowdlerizations, cutting out such oaths as “god damn,” “ass” and “hell,” as well as erasing the merest of references to nudity, alcohol use, abortion, and even erasing navels from its character’s bodies! So if you think you’ve already read Bradbury’s book, don’t be so sure, and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? (Here is some great supporting material from the National Endowment for the Arts).

What do you think of the book, and the issues it raises?