“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
—Joseph Brodsky, Russian-American poet
Do you remember “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury?
Wait, I know that one! Isn’t that one where it’s like a future society and the government burns books or something?
Yes and No.
Yes, it’s based in the future. The second part, however, is where our memories of high school book reports begin to go up in smoke.
For books set in dystopian worlds, we have the classics: George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Both Orwell and Huxley believed that life in the future was destined to be controlled by top-down authority. Orwell pictured “Big Brother” video surveillance while Huxley envisaged ecstasy-like “Soma” tablets, among other things.
Yet, Bradbury had a different idea in mind.
Continue reading here.