Fahrenheit 451 (book)

It's September... and Banned Book Week occurs the last week of September every year…
What are you reading?

I am just posting here to get you started... but let me ask some thought provoking questions, based on my reading of this book, or any book for that matter:

Do you believe in the freedom to read, write, think and speak your mind, your conscious, your heart? What if the page you are reading was "banned" because it contained something offensive to someone somewhere? When was the last time you heard of a book being banned? Should books be banned? Why or why not? Do you believe in "freedom?" And what exactly does freedom mean... to you?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Also a movie by this title)

This book was a fascinating journey of mind for me. In fact, a few years ago I wrote: "Fahrenheit 451 was one of my personal favorite reads this year!" and you can quote me on that!
But let me add, This book uses swear words in it and some people want it to be banned.

You do know, don't you , that even the so-called "Great works of literature" have been banned: "Ulysses," "Canterbury Tales," "The Arabian Nights," "Frankenstein," "Call of the Wild," not to mention religious works like The Bible have been banned at one time or another, somewhere. That in itself is an interesting topic of study and discussion, thought provoking in fact; but back to this book....

This book was published in 1953. That is over fifty years ago and it helps to think about what life was like fifty years ago compared to today. The world was different.. very different. This is a science fiction book and Bradbury had no idea of the future when he wrote, he just imagined another world and another place and time and imagined a story that we can read today and feel a little bit like he was writing about us today in many ways. His writing is provocative in that there are religious overtones to the story, symbolism too, and it's a book that reminds us, as Theodore Roosevelt, President of the US, once said, ".books are weapons in the war for ideas..."

In this story, people are no longer intellectual; they no longer read books. Books have all been banned. Instead, the people of Bradbury's future are driven by their senses... teenagers road rage for entertainment.. and it's the legal norm. Humans exist for the sole purpose of visual and audio stimulation... their television sets encompassing their living room walls and people walk around with something called "seashells" in their ears, listening to music constantly and communicating, never given a thought to the natural world.

It's a systematic, machine and electric driven world where the machines of the land have take on "lifelike qualities" and even have entertainment value. They even have invented and use a 'mechanical hound' to hunt, selections made of course by the creatures amino acid sequence, but more than for mere hunting, this culture, into sensory stimulation, uses such a mechanical beast as this, (man's best friend replica) for the grotesque pleasure of watching the creature die.

It's a shocking book, even uses swear words in the text, something for which some want it banned from reading in the schools, but then, what about "freedom" of speech? What about freedom of thought? What about Freedom of the press?

Besides, it's fiction... science fiction.

So, it's about this guy who is a fireman. It's his job to protect the public, to preserve the common good and burn down anything that hints of thinking outside the norms for his society... mainly to stamp out any threat of books. But a few things happen to this guy, for instance he meets a young girl one day who make him think... and then...

This is his story. The story of his discovery of what really was inside all those things he's been told to burn... books.

And it's amazing. I read this book just before the "Blue Tooth" thing was popular for cell phones and they sure looked like a "sea shell" to me. And by the way, have you been to Best Buy lately? I hear they are having a sale on wall-to wall-TV's.