While I'm at it...
While I'm waiting for my blog hits to just EXPLODE (ha ha), I get to rant endlessly about whatever I want. So, I thought, why not books? Someone has said that to in order to write well, one must be well-read. I'm not into a lot of highbrow literature, but I do enjoy reading.
Anyone who knew me in high school knows that has not always been the case. I was called a lot of things in high school, but bookish was not one of them. But after a year or two in the Air Force, living in the barracks with no mode of transportation apart from a friend's car, I found myself staring at a stack of used books in an old shop, and one in particular caught my eye: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
What a perfect "first book" for me (I had read several in high school, but this was the first that I had chosen for myself to read). It was - and I think still is - the quintessential anti-book story. In a nutshell, it is about a future world where books are banned, and firemen only exist to start fires in the homes of the "lawless" who are found possessing books.
It won't spoil anything to tell you that one fireman becomes fascinated by the contents of several books he has taken from a burning house. As his dangerous curiosity for reading increased, so did mine. I've never thanked Ray Bradbury (who at this writing is very much alive), but I guess I have read that book at least five times. And in the years since I first read it, not one year has gone by that I did not read several new books (in 2001, I read 17).
Even more amazing than the story itself is Bradbury's prescient view of the future. He wrote the book in the early 1950s, yet I counted a dozen or more things (technology, inventions, etc.) that did not exist in those days that are now quite commonplace. He really had amazing foresight. And not just for future science, but for the politics of book-banning, the propaganda of censureship. It's frightening to realize that there are cultures in the world today in which owning a certain book or preaching a certain doctrine can mean a death sentence for the guilty party.
As Thanksgiving nears, it certainly makes me glad to live in America. Not everything's perfect here, I know. But we are a free people. It may not be a direct quote, but Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government in the world - except for all the other ones that have been tried."
Anyone who knew me in high school knows that has not always been the case. I was called a lot of things in high school, but bookish was not one of them. But after a year or two in the Air Force, living in the barracks with no mode of transportation apart from a friend's car, I found myself staring at a stack of used books in an old shop, and one in particular caught my eye: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
What a perfect "first book" for me (I had read several in high school, but this was the first that I had chosen for myself to read). It was - and I think still is - the quintessential anti-book story. In a nutshell, it is about a future world where books are banned, and firemen only exist to start fires in the homes of the "lawless" who are found possessing books.
It won't spoil anything to tell you that one fireman becomes fascinated by the contents of several books he has taken from a burning house. As his dangerous curiosity for reading increased, so did mine. I've never thanked Ray Bradbury (who at this writing is very much alive), but I guess I have read that book at least five times. And in the years since I first read it, not one year has gone by that I did not read several new books (in 2001, I read 17).
Even more amazing than the story itself is Bradbury's prescient view of the future. He wrote the book in the early 1950s, yet I counted a dozen or more things (technology, inventions, etc.) that did not exist in those days that are now quite commonplace. He really had amazing foresight. And not just for future science, but for the politics of book-banning, the propaganda of censureship. It's frightening to realize that there are cultures in the world today in which owning a certain book or preaching a certain doctrine can mean a death sentence for the guilty party.
As Thanksgiving nears, it certainly makes me glad to live in America. Not everything's perfect here, I know. But we are a free people. It may not be a direct quote, but Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government in the world - except for all the other ones that have been tried."
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