Thursday, October 01, 2020

This Is Banned Book Week


This is Banned Books Week.
In memory of one banned book, here’s a paragraph from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

"How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackel of the flames."

Fahrehenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns and substantive knowledge and information is destroyed.

Ray Bradbury was writing about the danger of "truthiness" long before the idea was clear or the phrase first coined.

He knew that when people stopped reading and got their news from a talking automaton on television, bad things were just around the corner.

He knew.

What books have your read in the last month?

If you want to expand your mind, try any of the once-banned books, below.

1 comment:

Aoibheall said...

Let's not forget everything written by Henry Miller!