In honor of Banned Books Week, which is held every year during the last moth of September by the American Library Association, I'm going to be writing a series of posts about my favorite banned or challenged books. To kick things off, I've got quite a bit to say about the best work of dystopian fiction I've ever read, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.I actually owe my first encounter with this book to the Disney Channel original TV series The Famous Jett Jackson. In one episode -- the only one I actually remember -- Jett's English teacher assigned Fahrenheit 451 to the class, only to be told that it was inappropriate reading for such young students (they were meant to be in middle school, perhaps high school). Jett and his friends fought back, and with the help of their teacher, they were able to keep Bradbury's text on the reading list and teach a valuable lesson about censorship at the same time. I was nine years old and in third grade at the time, but I was already a voracious and precocious reader, so I approached my father (who had been a high school English teacher, and possessed a collection of books my younger self intensely admired) to ask him whether we owned the book. He was probably a bit surprised, but he promised to look through his boxes for me and find out. When it turned out he didn't have a copy, he too me to the then-newly-constructed city library, where I sought out Fahrenheit 451 (with the help of a bemused children's librarian, who kindly walked me to the "grown-up" shelves and helped me find it), checked it out, and brought it home to read.
I worked through the book slowly, haltingly, certain that there was so much I wasn't "getting" but nonetheless feeling the telltale buildup of unease in the region of my stomach that Bradbury's most thought-provoking works continue to produce in me to this day. Of course, I was still a third-grader, and even for me Bradbury's style was intense. When it came time to decide between renewing the book or returning it to the library, I decided to return it, though I was perhaps only a third of the way through.
Fast-forward about five years. By the summer before my freshman year of high school, I had been transformed from a girl who'd read anything and everything with equanimity into a fledgling fan of science fiction and fantasy (thanks primarily to the influence of J. K. Rowling and Anne McCaffrey). I was excited about entering high school, finally being one of the "big kids," and decided that it was time for me to really sink my teeth into some serious reading to prove that I was ready for this. So again I appealed to my father's book collection, grown slightly less mystical over time, and when I found it lacking, I headed for the bookstore to acquire copies of the dystopian masterpieces I kept hearing about but had never read: Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.
I read them both within the span of a few weeks, and my world really hasn't been the same since.
Most American schoolchildren past junior high probably have some idea what Fahrenheit 451 is "about": state control of the media, censorship, and of course book-burning. And it is about those things, and they're some of the reasons why you should read it. But to me, the book has always suggested a more frightening and more general premise than even these labels can provide: What would become of a society without books? Bradbury at least seems to feel like a loss of literature would result in a loss of all those things we think of as most nobly human -- and whether it's due to the power of his writing or the truth of his convictions, I'm inclined to agree.
Over the years, I've realized that I'm incredibly lucky. When I was nine years old and asked my dad if he had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 lying around, he didn't tell me I couldn't read it. Knowing full well what it was and what it represented, he didn't reproach me for wanting to read it; neither did that saintly librarian. In fact, I can't remember any adult ever telling me that I couldn't read something. If anything, they were the ones who opened my eyes to the wealth of written material the world in store for me, and the best of them offered themselves up as guides through the maze of the literary world.
Not all children grow up like I did. Not all children can take their right to read for granted. Not all adults can take their right to read for granted: censorship affects people of all ages, and though in this country at this moment we're most aware of the books that parents try to keep their kids from reading, the historical precedents in the case of book-banning don't provide particularly sterling examples.
In Berlin, there is an open square called the Bebelplatz. In the center of the square, a small glass window in the ground lets observers peer into a room constructed underneath the surface of the square. The room is full of bookshelves. The bookshelves are all empty. At the edge of the square, the above plaques are set into the ground, each of them likewise the size of a paving stone. The quote by Heinrich Heine reads, "Where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people." As it turns out, the empty bookshelves beneath the square provide just enough space to hold all the books burned by Nazi sympathizers in this square; they are left empty in remembrance of the deeds this place has witnessed. The only thing I love better than this memorial is the living one that manifests just across the square in the form of the weekly university book market.
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