#10: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

In my self-challenge to read more of the classics, I picked up Fahrenheit 451, a book I've meant to read many times before. I have a bit of a prejudice against anything written much before my birth, which is part of the reason I am trying to read less current fiction and more of the tried-and-true "famous" literature, to broaden my horizons.

I stand in awe of this book. The blurb on the back calls it, "Ray Bradbury's classic novel of censorship and defiance," I, however, call it a love letter to literature. I feel raw after reading this, scared to envision a future where books are a joke (not just a crime) and tv is the lifeblood of the world.

Still, it's more than that, more than just the flowing prose of someone who has reading in his blood, in his soul. It's the casual way in which people recount sitting back and watching something they consider so sacred being scorned, destroyed, vilified ... it calls to a larger picture of society knowing something is fundamentally wrong yet still letting it occur. Because it's easier. Because it's cleaner.

Life is not clean, life is not easy. Standing up for that in which you believe won't be clean or easy, either. But "dirty" takes on new meaning when you're looking inside yourself and your past and that's what you see.

(Written 2007, edited for grammar in 2020. "I edit, therefore, I am.")