Book Club Selection for November
The book club selection for November is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
It is unfortunate that I'll not be able to attend the book club meeting this month. This is another of the recent books that I really enjoyed. I believed that I had read it when I was younger, but now I am not so sure. I would think I would have remembered it if I had. Clearly Montag is a conflicted character even before we meet him, a closet book hoarder, maybe even a bookworm. He clearly is too much of a thinker to fit in very well in this dystopia. The parallels with actual book burnings is very eeire. The parallels I see here are first with Atlas Shrugged (especially the end), and then as I think of them, the movie "Brazil", and books like "1984" and "A Wrinkle in Time" (Camazotz).
Of course, if we play the outcast line a little further, we end up with the fact that this is a good book for the Mensa book club, where many of us may feel more or less disconnected with the mainstream society. I guess I wonder about the 98% of Mensa-qualified people who do not join. Perhaps they are more adaptable or just do not need the social support network that this organization provides. But I digress.
I hope the copies you read have a "coda" by the author. The copy of the book I have shows the coda added in 1979. In it the author rails against political correctness, censorship and the slippery slope of narrow mindedness, even to the point where Fahrenheit 451 had been edited without the authors knowledge in some 75 spots. Students in a class wrote to tell him of this irony. He did not choose to chronicle his reaction.
It is unfortunate that I'll not be able to attend the book club meeting this month. This is another of the recent books that I really enjoyed. I believed that I had read it when I was younger, but now I am not so sure. I would think I would have remembered it if I had. Clearly Montag is a conflicted character even before we meet him, a closet book hoarder, maybe even a bookworm. He clearly is too much of a thinker to fit in very well in this dystopia. The parallels with actual book burnings is very eeire. The parallels I see here are first with Atlas Shrugged (especially the end), and then as I think of them, the movie "Brazil", and books like "1984" and "A Wrinkle in Time" (Camazotz).
Of course, if we play the outcast line a little further, we end up with the fact that this is a good book for the Mensa book club, where many of us may feel more or less disconnected with the mainstream society. I guess I wonder about the 98% of Mensa-qualified people who do not join. Perhaps they are more adaptable or just do not need the social support network that this organization provides. But I digress.
I hope the copies you read have a "coda" by the author. The copy of the book I have shows the coda added in 1979. In it the author rails against political correctness, censorship and the slippery slope of narrow mindedness, even to the point where Fahrenheit 451 had been edited without the authors knowledge in some 75 spots. Students in a class wrote to tell him of this irony. He did not choose to chronicle his reaction.
posted by Bill Rock | 10:08 PM
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