Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

22:48You know, what is a, what can a book do? It can take you out of the moment. It can give you a moment of interiority. It can give you perspective on the world that's not your own in that moment. And maybe more importantly, for many of the books, especially things that have been around for a while, they're not really interested in whatever the kerfuffle or the culture war of the day is. They have no perspective on it. So it is just a way of getting some distance from being stuck in the world you're in. And that's something Handmaid's Tale is about. That's something 1984 is about. That's something Parable of Sower is about.

23:23That's something this book is about. It's like, how do you jar yourself out of complacency and just going along with it and being subject to it? And the book is a vessel for it, but it's not the real thing. And we'll get that to the moment of like, that's another interesting about Fahrenheit 451. As much as it is, yay, books, it's like, yeah, books are just a means to an end. They're not ends in themselves necessarily.

23:47Jeff:Exactly. Yeah. It's just much more tangly than the synopsis leads you to believe. And I think one of the additional reasons this continues to hit is that Bradbury was right about so much. Like, the story predicts in 150 pages, ATMs, earbuds that we use to sort of stay in our own worlds instead of actual reality, televised fugitive chases like what we saw with OJ Simpson, short form videos, interactive video media, and parasocial relationships with people we see on screens. There's just a lot in 2026 that feels very true to what shows up on the page in Fahrenheit 451. And that helps a book stand the test of time.

24:29Jeff:It's similar to The Parable of the Sower starts in 2024. And when we read it last year in 2025, things that Octavia Butler had predicted would happen in this moment we're living in are happening. It just makes it especially chilling and powerful. Given the subject matter, ironically, is this irony, Jeff, one of the most banned books of the last century? Not really, but I've come around to a more colloquial use of irony because we really don't have a word for, I don't know, striking coincidence, right? Irony in a classical definition is if someone says or represents something they don't actually mean, you know, sarcasm is a version of irony.

25:09But there is, we do want to acknowledge these moments, that seems the closest thing I can think of is in The Inferno, where the punishment sort of fits the crime. It's called contrapasso in Italian, where, you know, if you were slovenly, then you had to like clean up or you had to eat or something the whole time, like the punishment fits the crime. We want some sense of, it's almost poetic justice, but in that sense, it's like poetic injustice. And we just don't have a word for it. So we use irony. And I've come around to that myself.

25:36Jeff:I like poetic injustice for a book about book banning, being one of the most banned books of the last two centuries. And despite that, this book has never been out of print in its almost 75 years of existence. It's estimated to have sold 10 to 12 million copies worldwide. And, you know, we've just not got accurate data on that. But this is a mainstay on school syllabi, one of the most popular works. And then as we said, it does reappear on bestseller lists every couple of years as things happen around the world. Yeah. And just one note, it's like so many people, there's obvious parallels to 1984, right?

26:12And Bradbury even said, like, I can totally see it. But actually, it was Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon, which is really about Stalin. So what's interesting is Orwell comes to this sci-fi, dystopian speculative fiction from a more literary bent. And Bradbury comes to social commentary from a more sci-fi bent. And it's interesting to think of what puts him over the line is, this is a social realist novel, Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon. But he's using the tools of science fiction to explore some of the same ideas. It's trying to do the same thing with different tools. And I find that really interesting to think about.

26:47Jeff:And I read the last interview that Bradbury gave with Sam Weller, which is published by Melville House, has this wonderful little book series called The Last Interview. It's very cool. It's wonderful. If you haven't seen it, this is worth looking up. As authors pass away, Melville House will find the last interview that was conducted by that author, or usually they tap an expert in that author's work who then curates a selection of interviews that were given over the course of their career or near the end of their career. Sam Weller was Bradbury's authorized biographer. They had a close relationship for decades.

27:23Jeff:And he asks Bradbury in the last interview that they conducted together on stage, like, how do you think of yourself? And Bradbury identifies first as a science fiction writer. And Sam says something to him about, yeah, but you're also literary. And he says, yes, that too. But like the spirit of him is in sci-fi and genre writing. And at the publication, Bradbury was 31 years old. He was born in Illinois in 1920. Then he moved to Arizona when he was six. But at the time of the publication, he was already considered among the first rank or maybe the best working science fiction writer, which is amazing to think about, right?

27:57Usually it's a signal work like this. At 31 years old. Fahrenheit 451 would put you over the top, you would think, like movie. But really, he's already writing. And I think that's one of the reasons that Ballantyne got so excited is like this is someone with name recognition all over. we're seeing demand for sci-fi stories in these magazines. One reason those magazines were flourishing is there wasn't a much of a place for them in traditional, like, I don't want to say regular, but like big time commercial publishing, right? We didn't have the environment. We didn't have Ray Bradbury and George Orwell and Douglas Adams and Ursula K.

28:31Le Guin and Octavia Butler. They were not in the sci-fi world that we're in now, sci-fi fantasy especially. And so these like little magazines sprung up to both have a place for these writers to work in it. And he got involved in LA in the science fiction society where he met Robert Heinlein, who wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, if you haven't heard of him. That's one name that seems to have fallen even since I was a kid reading science fiction. I'm now with a nugget within a nugget. The word grok was invented by Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land to describe the idea of just getting something.

29:03And now it's been used for other things and talk about used to the opposite Now it's AI, Elon Musk stuff, which I'm not that interested in. But these things do go over from time. So there's like a self-fulfilling, perpetuating community of interest in writing science fiction writers, a community there. And those things then build on each other. And because there isn't really an establishment, they get to publishing very oddly. They publish odd books in odd ways, Rebecca.

29:31Jeff:They do. And this is one of the great literary origin stories that I've ever read. Like you couldn't make it up. Like if this weren't true and he made it up, I would also believe that, that he made this up. It's incredible stuff. Bradbury grew up loving the library, was one of those kids that loved to read. His family was poor. The library was a really important resource for him. And then when he graduated from high school, he didn't go to college. Again, family was poor. So he got a job selling newspapers. And then three days a week after work, he went to the library. Three days a week after work for 10 years.

30:06Jeff:He went to the library. And so then he says, I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. This is enabled by the fact that he was rejected from military service during World War II because of bad eyesight. So he started writing sci-fi stories in his spare time. And then in 1938, as you said, he was invited to join the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. He met Heinlein, he met other writers, he really starts to build up community and reputation and take his place. but lived in LA then for the rest of his life. He was married. He had a couple of daughters, and he and his family lived in the same home that he bought early in his career for the rest of his life.

30:45Jeff:And he continued to be just in love with the library. This book was written, or the original story of The Fireman was written in the UCLA library, which had pay-for-play typewriters. You put in a dime and you got half an hour. So it cost him$9.80 to write the first draft of the fireman over like a very feverish nine days where he would sit down, he would write a session, and then he would like passionately pace the stacks of the library and seek his information and just be in that vibe. when he went to revise it in 1953 and expand the story into the novella that we know now. He did it again. He went back to the library for another nine days.

31:27Jeff:Just an incredible writing story. So charming. And I think that, like, Bradbury was a lifelong advocate of libraries, and he talked about not just anti-censorship messaging, but his love of libraries and how central they are to our communities. And I think that that raised him up to literary hero status. And then we kind of forgot or missed and never knew some of the things that were more complex about him. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about this on the Book Riot podcast and together about, you know, one of the writers you and I most respect and look to that maybe we don't, our gut isn't to agree with all their, I don't know, statements or beliefs or just, is Salman Rushdie.

32:10And we read his memoir, Knife, two years ago now it's been. And you would think there might be someone out there that's like, you know, people shouldn't say that because he's literally lost an eye. He's been under Fatwa for a million years for, you know, freedom of speech. And he's, but he is very much like, not quite an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech, but pretty close. Like he, let them say it and then we'll say something back, right? Rather than nip something in the bud or silence people for ideas you don't agree with, make your full-throated case. Express yourself and then get it into because the thing he's most afraid of, even more than sort of quote-unquote losing the argument, is it being squelched, the ability for ideas to be bandied about squelched.

32:56And this is something that's, I think, good for all of us to remember when we're thinking about they shouldn't say that or they should lose their job. And I'm not saying you have to rethink all those things all the time, but where does it verge into really cutting off the oxygen for people to say unpopular things? Because usually progress comes from unpopular things. And in 50 years, I'm sure there's things I think right now that are going to show to be ridiculous and other ideas, giving some space for those ideas, even if I don't agree with them, again, within the laws that we have and safety and other things.

33:33Because he is very concerned with special interests is how we think about it now. And there's a section in Fahrenheit 451, which he sort of satirically lists a bunch of special interests that if they all had their say about what could and couldn't be said, no one would say anything. And he's sort of right, Rebecca, but that is fascinating. I think the thing that he doesn't understand or doesn't think about in a way which we do now is how power matters in those relationships and how to think about differences of social status and class and access to oppression and the tools of oppression. But I do think it's a welcome, if not a corrective, a lodestar to be like, okay, am I in the direction of ideas being available to people, even unpopular ones?

34:20Because sometimes the unpopular ones are going to be better for people and where we want ourselves and our country and our societies and our art to go, and some of them are not. But you're not going to necessarily know all the time ahead of the time, Rebecca. It's difficult.

34:33Jeff:I think if your understanding of what anti-censorship and pro-freedom of speech work looks like is grounded in today's political scene, you'd be really surprised by Bradbury's background. Because in the 50s, we were a little bit more in the place of freedom of speech as a shared American value that people across on both sides of the aisle hold. Bradbury didn't fall cleanly into one political camp. A lot of the mid-century sci-fi writers were, as one of the friends I was talking to about this put it, really great political weirdos. And Bradbury's thinking about things was really interesting. He saw the threat of censorship as most likely to come from really what we would talk about as identity politics today.

35:20Jeff:He was suspicious of ideologies and he leaned conservative. He voted for Republicans in every election from 1980 until his death in 2012. In the last interview, which is from 2010, he's on stage talking about like he answers an audience member's question for how can we keep books safe? And he's like, we need to get a new president. This is when Obama's in the White House. You know, he's like, the president we have right now has too much faith in government. He thinks that government can do too many things. He's controlling people's lives. We need to elect somebody different and that will protect books.

35:53Jeff:Like, really interesting to wonder what would, what Bradbury, what kind of statements he would have been making post-2016. I'm not sure he'd be a fan, Rebecca. I'm just going to put that out there of how things have gone under certain subsequent administrations. But it's interesting to put that in the context with Orwell, too, because one of the sort of consistent misreadings of Orwell is that his critique of oppression and tyranny is one-sided, like left to right or right to left. And I think Bradbury and Orwell are sympathetic in this regard, which is attacks on individual freedom, which they both care about maybe more than anything else, can come from multiple angles.

36:32Neither side has a stranglehold on the banner of what Bradbury or Orwell value most, or Rushdie for that matter. Maybe some of the other issues they're more aligned with, but if your central issue, especially if you grew up and were writing under McCarthyism, right, you could see that suspicion of the government would be the number one thing that you would be worried about. And so I think it's important as we look at these books and where they come from to understand the political moment they come out of, their own specifics, but also particular ideologies and party affiliations don't necessarily meet MAPLY over time 50, 60, 75 years later.

37:10So to say he's a Republican, was a Republican, would be now, I don't know. These things change all the time. But I think the pearl we want to keep here, I want to keep here is remember the importance of intellectual freedom, right? Remember that is the baby we do not want to throw out with the bathwater for Orwell and for Bradbury and Zora Neale Hurston we talked about before. Her own politics are not something that maybe we would, ourselves would neatly align upon, but she was more interested in her ability to say what she wanted to say. And when you get into a situation where you are saying to an artist, you're saying to a thinker, you do not have the ability to say that because of X, Y, or Z, that's a good moment to check that.

37:52I'm not saying you have to say, authorize everything, but it's a good heuristic to be like, huh, I wonder, you know, is this falling in the broader scope? Is this what the kind of conversation I want to be a part of in this way?

38:03Jeff:And Bradbury experienced it firsthand, Not only was the book banned, but it was censored. Ballantyne made a censored version for use in schools in the 70s. It was out there for many years, and he was never aware of it. They didn't tell him they were doing this until a student wrote to him, and he started to figure out that there was a whole version of his book out there. And then he insists that Ballantyne revert back to the original print and that there be no other versions. It's like, I wish that I had gone and looked. It's just occurring to me now. Like, I wonder if you can get collector's editions of those censored versions.

38:37Jeff:I wondered the same thing. Of Fahrenheit 451. But now if you read it in school, you're reading the real McCoy, the uncut, uncensored text. But interesting even that his publisher recognized complicated parts of this book that might be difficult for people. and they willingly changed it and did it without his knowledge or consent. That's a wild story. That's a wild thing to do at the same time. Our first exposure, I'll go, this is more you than me. This is, I like this book, but this, I know this is important to you. I got to, I never was assigned for Fahrenheit 451. I read it as a teenager when I was in my like real hardcore sci-fi age.

39:11Like I was more of a Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov person. I saw Fahrenheit 451 in that mode, right? I kind of read it as sci-fi first and rather as a, I don't know, a political diatribe, a political tract, like mostly a political document. I read it mostly as a sci-fi document initially. So that sort of colored my own reading of it over time. But this is closer to your literal and physical self, Rebecca, Fahrenheit 451.

39:36Jeff:It is. This was my freshman year in high school. It was very early, like one of the first books that we read. And just was a life-changing read for me. I didn't know that books could feel this way. You know, like I Say more about that. What was it? What was the feeling about that? I was coming out of, you know, YA didn't really exist when we were kids. So I was coming out of whatever, like Babysitter's Club, whatever I had been reading. That's so cool. That's a whiplash. Okay, I hear you. Like elementary and middle school. I didn't have a lot of exposure to genre writing. I didn't even understand this book as a science fiction book until like well into my 20s.

40:14Jeff:because it was just presented to me in English class as a work of literature. So just, oh, like he's telling this story. We're projecting into the future. It's an alternate imagining of where we might end up. I just never read anything like it. I didn't know that there were books out there that did this. I imagine if 1984 had come first in my reading life, that would have been the same kind of thing, but just hugely impactful. And it again, like, it's an exciting thing to read. The story is on rails. And I was moved by it. And I was a person who loved books. And we were living in Kansas. And another English teacher at my high school was maybe going to get fired for teaching Romeo and Juliet because it included underage sex.

41:01Jeff:So there was like, the threat of book banning was happening in the hallways. People were talking about it. It just felt very present. And also the pitch of like, he's a fireman, but in the future, they don't put out fires, they burn the books is so like, come on. It's just so good. It's like, it's a great hook. It's a great hook by itself. And Bradbury is a great writer. Like sci-fi, a lot of genre fiction gets the shaft sometimes for like, it's just plot. There's just stuff happening. They're following tropes. There's not a lot of tropification in Fahrenheit 451. And the writing is really, really good.

41:36Jeff:He has a broad and interesting vocabulary, a really deep bench of literary references. I didn't get a lot of that. He writes unusual sentences. I don't really know. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to break down individual sentences, but coming to it again, I think you're right. He's a good writer in a way that feels different than other kinds of good writers. You'll know, like a New Yorker kind of a writer. That's wonderful. I love The New Yorker, but it kind of has a house style. There's a certain competence of sheen to it. But even certain paragraphs be kind of herky-jerky sometimes or descriptors that are a little bit odd.

42:14I think you can tell, I don't know, I'm just projecting here, that he doesn't have a classical education. He came to this through his own wild and uncanny path and he has his own wild and uncanny style at the same time, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

42:28Jeff:There's an urgency to it. There's just an urgency to the way that it's written. It's one of the great examples of as the action in the story picks up, the language and the sentences pick up, and you are just sort of carried along with it. But just a really important book to me, and it is the source of my only literary tattoo. Many tattoos, only one of them. We're not going to make you say what it is. You can keep that. You can put a veil over that for now. Yeah. So we're veering into what it's like to read this and what it's all about. So it is a page turner, especially in the second half of the book, when, you know, when you realize that he has been transgressing the whole time we've known Guy Montag.

43:03Like that's one of the cool things the book does is it seems like he's just a cog in the machine from the beginning. But he is already, you know, he's had some encounters. He's done some things already that suggests he's on his way to some kind of resistance. even though he doesn't know that is the case.

43:19Jeff:Yeah, there's like Chekhov's ventilation grill in this book where we know that he's hiding something behind this vent in his home. And it turns out, of course, that he's got a stash of books there that are going to come out at a critical moment. What do you have in the vents in your home? Is this something that only happens in TV shows and movies? Does anyone actually hide stuff in their air ducts? That never would occur to me. Where would I put my contraband is a good question. Probably not an air vent. I don't know. Okay. I'm just thinking out loud here. It's like, this is a thing that now you put it in the ceiling.

43:51Whereas if I'm looking for... Now it's to the point where if I'm looking for something that someone's hidden, I'm going to the ceiling first, under the mattress and the ceiling first. Anyway. Yeah.

43:59Jeff:I mean, some of us are five feet tall, so putting things in the ceiling is just impractical. It's like putting it on top of Mount Everest. Like, this just can't get there. Might as well not exist. Yeah. But yeah, there is this... to get back to the book, we come to the understanding that Montag has been on this path for a little while. He's been flirting with resistance, flirting with rebellion, and then seeing Clarice and the freedom that she seems to have combined with watching that woman go down with her books in literal flames, wakes something up in him. And it's that awakeness that propels the story, but also really stands in contrast to everyone else that he encounters, or to his wife, to their friends, to the fire captain Beatty.

44:43Jeff:It's us getting to see Montag wake up. And it's just fascinating in this moment. This is the third or fourth time I've read this in my life, but fascinating in this moment where we are seeing a rise in book banning. We're seeing attempts at fascism and authoritarianism around the world, but the book banning is a symptom. It's not the disease. That's right. That's right. And Bradbury even talked about this himself. He said, you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. And it's that part. It's the just get people to stop reading them and what happens then.

45:18Yeah. He makes some claims even explicitly and implicitly about how ideas traffic, how you can stop them, what the role of the book is in an ecosystem of the exchange of ideas and the ability to think for oneself and to have a different idea, to live a different kind of life. And one of them is almost that the direct imposition of oppression is more likely to be resisted than the implicit ones. We just spend a bunch of time in our three-walled media environments. We just don't want to deal with it. We're not interested. It's hard and it takes us out of our comfort zone. And people say things that are contradictory and complicated, right?

46:03And that's something I didn't remember. This is only my second time reading this. This is not something I remembered when I was reading as a 14, 15-year-old is there's another argument within this. It's almost like a version of Marx's, you know, religion is the opiate of the masses. There's something here which is entertainment and technology. Technological entertainment is the opiate of the masses. Because notice it's not going to a play and seeing real people do stuff that is the scene of intellectual subjection. It is the by yourself or with, you know, other people and you're immersed in things that come into you for reasons you don't really understand.

46:34and kind of scratch some other kind of itch that you're looking for, which is pleasure, which is comfort, which is, in the Millie's case of her earbuds, a kind of like an intellectual or sensory or psychological palette of euthanasia. I just want it to, I just don't want to think. I just don't want to be uncomfortable. But then what he says is you do that long enough and that leads to unhappiness by itself. Like it's a false idol to look for comfort in your art because eventually it's going to take you a place of unhappiness, which is one of the things he's sort of arguing here.

47:10Jeff:Yeah, there's the weird logic of the book is, you know, that the that people have stopped reading because it makes them unhappy. That philosophy is difficult. It makes you uncomfortable. Beatty says something about like, don't give them anything challenging. That way lies melancholy. But that in attempting to avoid that, people have plugged into all this immersive media. And those are the things that really make them unhappy. Like on this reading, it was people's willing participation in just completely separating themselves from reality and immersing in media that was the most chilling and recognizable.

47:46Yeah, Millie's plight is the most chilling part for me, right? Because it seems different. It seems plausible with the details changed a little bit to see. And I think we do, you know, we talk about doom scrolling, for example, like he doesn't have that idea in this book, but it's not, it's a cousin of this idea of consuming things that in each individual moment of it, it feels like, I don't know, enjoyment's not even the right word, Rebecca, but like, you keep doing it because it's doing something for it. It's avoidance. It's some sort of disassociation. And in each individual second of it, you don't notice the accrual.

48:23It's like climate change almost. Like over long periods of time, it accrues. But in the individual moment, you're not really seeing or reckoning with it in its moment. And that's a freaking terrifying kind of experience.

48:35Jeff:Yeah, that the mythology here is that people just willingly stopped reading because it was hard to engage with ideas that made them uncomfortable. And then the government realized that they could benefit from people not engaging with ideas and not thinking for themselves. Yeah, that's a great point. It's different from Orwell in that way, which is much more Big Brother Down. This is much more bottom up, like books are kind of annoying. And they're like, okay, well, weirdly, the inciting instance of this whole book seems to be that we invented how to make houses not burn. That's kind of a weird idea.

49:05But then firemen didn't have a job to do. It's just sort of the standing army. We talked about the U.S. Constitution episode of The Man about, like, the problems of the standing army. But they had this standing burn unit. And, like, okay, well, we are actually serving the will of the people. I think we're given to understand it's sort of the will of the people to have these squads out there. Like there's not protests in the streets. Like get rid of the burn units. Right. That's not how this is happening.

49:29Jeff:Yeah. No, people are willingly calling the firemen on their neighbors to report that they have books in their houses. Like, and Montag even considers along with Faber, the old professor, using that as a way to get back at people. Like what if we hide some books in their houses and then we call in reports? We can plant some drugs on them. Yeah. Yeah. But just that, like, it's so interesting that you refer to that opiate of the masses quote, because that was also one of my margin notes in the book was like, screens are the opiate of the masses. And Bradbury saw that coming. And there's some measure of like, he saw it coming in the 50s when TV was brand new.

50:02Jeff:And like, look, here we still are in 2026. But man. Well, you can see it with new eyes, kind of like Orwell, right? Because that's like these giant screens. They could, this new thing, like I can see the one way this goes at the same time. You mentioned Faber here, who is this, all the academics and intellectuals have been defrocked. They have not been cleansed. Like this is not a they sent them off to a camp situation, but they unless they're going to resist. But if you kind of go along with it, you can live these hollow lives. And Faber is this. He was a Harvard professor. We're given to understand.

50:35Jeff:That's the sound of zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine and the power to burn body fat. Storm Energy for Life. Storm Energy Blend helps boost metabolism, which in combination with exercise and a healthy diet helps burn fat. This product alone does not produce weight loss. Individual results may vary. I mean, he presents, I think this is through Faber's mouth, maybe a Bradbury theory of books. Rebecca, and you have it here. Do you want to walk us through what this sort of three-part theory of what we need from books is? Yeah, that we need quality and texture of information. We need leisure to digest it.

51:04Jeff:And then we need the right to act on what we learn. And so for Faber and for this kind of band of former intellectuals that he knows, Faber still lives in town. He has a house in town. But he tells Montag about these, they're called the book people, capital B, capital P book people. They live on the edges of town and kind of out in the forest. And they have this like, it gives me goosebumps every time. This is one of my favorite images from a book. They have memorized either parts of or entire texts because they know that carrying them inside them is the only way for those stories to live on. And Faber is talking to Montag about like, well, we don't have the books anymore.

51:42Jeff:But here are the things that we do have from books. And like, we've popped up these societies popped up these fire units to burn books because they don't want us to have detailed information. and this leisure to digest it, you don't have time to digest this information if you're plugged into a screen all the time or listening to your seashells in your ears. And then you don't have the right to act on what you have learned because you are in a totalitarian society. So they're recognizing their place, or Faber has recognized it already, and he's sort of introducing Montag, like really the structures that they are living inside.

52:21Jeff:And then the end of the book, though, is quite hopeful for as scary as the reading is. Montag goes on the run after they show up to burn his own house down, and he makes his way to the book people. He's pursued the whole time by this mechanical hound that's like a chemical tracking robot that can inject you with stuff to stop you in your tracks. He's able to evade it, and he makes his way to all these old professors, And he hears the stories about the books that they are carrying within them. And when the bombs start dropping on the city, it's the book people who we understand at the end are going to restart society.

53:03Jeff:They turn around and they walk into the city and they're like, we're going to be needed. We're going to be needed. Yeah. I want to dwell a minute on this idea of the quality texture of the information, right? It's an interesting idea that he's thinking about the texture of having, I don't know, some friction to it. It's palpable. It's not smooth, right? Because I think one thing he's suggesting there, even if it's not explicit, is there could be versions of books that do not do the things we need from books, which is to give us a texture, to give us quality, to give us a little bit of resistance or purchase or angles or something where the seeds of our own thinking can grow.

53:42It can fertilize them. And, you know, we here hold that reading is good across the board. But I also think it's fair to say that all reading is not the same and all books are not doing the same thing. And to think about books of quality and texture, it's kind of what we're trying to deal with here. We're not trying to say don't read the kinds. Any book we don't cover here is not something like bad, that's bad. But I think what we are looking for. It's not don't read for fun.

54:04Jeff:It's not don't read for fun. But I think what we are looking for in this show, and I think I'd say in our own personal reading lives, and I think for the people listening to this show, is to find books that have a quality or texture that is generative, that's fertile, that's transformative. I don't think that's unfair to say there. Yeah, the signal difference, I think, from 1984 is the end, the hopefulness of the end. And he comes to them and he has memorized some part of the book of Ecclesiastes, I believe. Is that right, Rebecca Montag? And they're like, wait, do we have an Ecclesiastes? Oh, not right here.

54:36There might be one in this other town. An idea that each individual person is like a volume in the library and this cross-identification of the book and the person. And that's another thing that Bradbury is doing here, right, is like the book is a vessel for the ideas. And there could be other vessels. and the last redoubt against oppression is in a human mind, like is that human interiority. And the central terror of 1984 is Big Brother gets to Winston Smith's interior. There is nothing, there is no stronghold within him where he could hold the book of Ecclesiastes, where Bradbury is saying like the technology is not there or there's a way of resistance where you can kind of hold it in your own mind and then you can carry it forward.

55:19And you become a dormant sort of seed, right? If the earth is not ready for it yet, eventually it will be ready for this seed to grow into a different kind of a tree. I was thinking about trees that only drop their seeds during a forest fire.

55:35Jeff:Oh, yeah. Right. They only hold them to that moment because they're a needed then, but then there's ground that's open for them to blossom and grow. And I kind of am thinking of this, the bombed out city as a forest fire and them as these seeds and these trees waiting for their moment. And then maybe some other kind of canopy can be restored at the same time. Yeah, it made me think about Station 11 a little bit, too, like this band of people at one end of the world or after what has felt like the end of society who are holding on to art as a mechanism for connection and survival and have committed it to memory and are going around to share it.

56:16Jeff:And that like among this community of book people out in the forest, somebody knows Hamlet and somebody knows book one of the Odyssey and somebody else in town knows book two. And they can find the guy who knows book three and they can build up over time. And that like maybe as they go back into the city, they will write these things back down and recreate like the stores of knowledge. But that it ends on a hopeful note, I think, is really important. And it's helpful today. It's just helpful to read this and to think about the resilience and creativity of humans in the face of attempts to tamp down expression and creativity.

56:55Jeff:And I just love and appreciate that Bradbury went there. But it is difficult to read still in some ways. And like this, for the couple days that I was reading this, it fucked me right up to be reading this book. You do not want to pick up your phone while you're reading. No. It makes you feel terrible. To be or like a friend was telling me about just blitzing through Love Island and having it on for 12 hours one day. And I was like, this is not the right day to tell me this. I thought about that. I did think about that when I was Michelle and I housed all eight episodes of The Bear in one afternoon.

57:30And I read Fahrenheit 42 right after. I was like, oh, oh, no. And again, that's not the kind of show I'm worried about the messaging. But like there is a medium is the message kind of thing going on.

57:40Jeff:The thing that really messed me up, though, was just like going to the grocery store and seeing how many people had earbuds in. You know, of like, we do have this way to just separate ourselves from our physical realities anytime we want. And how many people willingly choose it? Like, this is the, I guess, flow, the order of operations that Bradbury imagines where citizens just opt into not paying much attention, choosing entertainment over being informed, choosing entertainment over wrestling, like choosing really hollow entertainment in the Bradbury example. over wrestling with any kind of ideas.

58:20Jeff:That is not hard to imagine looking around our world today. And I understand why it can feel bleak, but I think Bradbury answers that himself with the way that the book ends. Yeah. Well, and Millie's fate, right? And I'll just jump down to one of my quotes because it's Jermaine here. He says, let you alone, that's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while? How long is it since you were really bothered about something important, something real? And the doom scroll, and this is something I fight against myself is putting in my earbuds when I go out for a run or go out for a walk.

58:54It's like, I just kind of want to make it easier for me to get through this. But getting through this easily is not how I want to spend my, like, there's a conflict in the human heart about this that I think a lot of us are trying to wrestle with. And this is one of the things that art and ideas can do. It's like, yeah, this is tough. That's tough, but that maybe is part of it at the same time.

59:14Jeff:Yeah. I was thinking about it where like my husband had baseball on when I was getting ready to cook dinner. Our kitchen and our living room are close to each other. And it was like, okay, I can hear, I can, I have options. I can listen to the baseball. I can ask him to change it to like, let's put on music we both like, or he can keep baseball and I can put my earbuds in and make dinner and we can both just be in our own little world. And I do it sometimes and it's easy and it's compelling, but the mindlessness of just reaching for it is something that I'm trying to watch for and that reading this really made me alert to.

59:47Jeff:I don't want to police other people's choices. And I know there are all kinds of reasons you might have earbuds in in public. Don't hear me shaming you about that. It really made me want to think about when am I not participating? When am I choosing to not be in reality? And why? And sometimes that's fine. And sometimes it's dangerous. And what is the slope? Where am I on that slope? Yeah. And there's an inversion too that you can think about where books are just a technology, right? There are vessels for something. We'll talk about that a little bit more a bit later. But one reason to know that the impetus to creativity in art and storytelling is not a product of the book is because it existed before there were books around.

1:00:31Like that's, we talked about this with the Odyssey, like it, it found a technology that would let it be disseminated and captured and like transport in a different way. But the book is not a necessary condition of having an idea of having an artistic experience of living and engaged in critical life. And that also is just that other technologies are not all good or bad of in themselves. Like, I think we like to think of this show as doing something different than other kinds of podcasts you might listen to that does some of the kinds of things an idea or a book or a work of art might do, which is a call to engage with things that are not yourself, a call to engage with things that are not readily consumable, that go down super easy, that are digestible in the moment, that cause you to say, to wonder and think and investigate and critique your own extant lives, the things that go out in the world, the message you see, the way you live your life and the mechanism.

1:01:21But there's no technology good or there's nothing good or bad that thinking makes it so. Is that Shakespeare? I think that's Shakespeare. I can't remember where that comes from. And I would also say there's no technology, good or bad, but that the use of it makes it so. And that books have a particular kind of potential. Their technological potential is interesting because I think it's worth talking about that they are physical, right? This is something that's interesting about audiobooks and ebooks. Most of you don't know, but your audiobook, ebook, you don't own that book. You have a sort of a license to it through the platform.

1:01:50So if Audible or Kindle or Apple ebooks or Bookshop goes away hey, tomorrow they're out of business, you're not going to have access necessarily to all those things that you've bought. Whereas the physical book can be hidden, it can be owned, it can be transported, it's inexpensive, it's non-technological, it's shared, right? It's borrowable, it's durable over time. And so to think about the particular technology of the book that is as vessels for certain kinds of ideas, and maybe there's other kinds of deals it's not, it lends itself to. But I think that's another thing that got me thinking about, okay, what is about the technology of the book that's amenable to certain kinds of ideas?

1:02:22And how could those apply to other technologies. So if I'm going to use those technologies, can I lean into those uses of technologies I want and away from the ones I don't?

1:02:30Jeff:Yeah. And it's just, I think we just live in a society that is so based in technology now. And it was picking up when Bradbury wrote this, that this story will continue to be relevant and powerful for generations to come, whatever their new technologies are, because it gives you a window into how to get out of that prison of your own making. You have a note here, and I want to hear you talk about the sparking of critical consciousness. I think that that's also what was happening for me in my freshman English class the first time I read this was a sense of an opening up in my mind of a new and bigger way of looking at the world and analyzing what was around me.

1:03:11Yeah. So, I mean, in the reading of the book, you realize relatively late in the book, his journey to critical consciousness is not linear going from zero to 100 or something like that. We're dropped in in media res of that, even if we don't know it. Whereas he's had this early conversation with Faber, like this other encounter that sort of jarred something. And there was some cross-identification. They saw something in each other. He sees something in this woman that self-immolates, right, essentially, or doesn't. Like, it's a little unclear about whether she chooses to stay with the books in the fire or doesn't.

1:03:42She lights the match. It's sort of a protest. It's hard not to think of, you know, images we see of self-immolations as political protests from places around the world and domestically as well. And then the thing that we join Montague with on his critical consciousness, he meets this young woman who's like 17-ish. She's sort of walking along the street one night and they have a moment of sympathy, empathy, cross-identification. Like she sees something in him and she's curious about whatever's going on with her. And that actually this kind of idea is what got this whole chain rolling for Fahrenheit 451.

1:04:18Ray Bradbury was out walking one night, and he kind of got hassled by the cops saying, you know, what are you doing out here? And Bradbury remarked kind of snidely, like putting one foot in front of the other, and they kind of hassled them. And he had this moment of being policed. And so he started thinking about like, that moment of being policed, but also the radicality of just sort of being yourself out in the world with no real agenda, or you're not making something, you're not going somewhere. You don't have your headphones in. Not that you could have had headphones in in 1946. They didn't really exist.

1:04:45He couldn't carry anything with you. But then you start to think, so what is it? And that encounter with an individual person out on the street then became the spark that gets this, like, he sees something that was outside of his own worldview. And it was interesting. It was attractive. And it was alluring. And that sort of builds with he had a little bit of favor. He sees something that triggered his, like, a human response in this woman striking a match and immolating. And he was not comfortable with his condition, his participation in that. And then he has this other person saying, there's another way to live, right?

1:05:19So you can come to a critical consciousness in several different ways. And I think he gets all three of them, right? It's like almost like a parable of some kind. You can get Faber. Okay, go ahead. Yeah.

1:05:29Jeff:I would say that while his wife is at home watching her family on the screens, he knows that Clarice and her actual family are sitting in their living room talking to each other. Yeah, talking to each other. To other people that actual exchange of ideas, connection with other people is the source of this spark and is the source of resistance. Like that if you want the option to step outside of your oppressive reality, you've got to connect with other people. Putting the earbuds in and taking the drugs and sitting in the four-walled screen rooms is just helping them. It makes it easier for them to keep you in the systems that you're already in.

1:06:12Yeah. So the move to a critical consciousness or move to thinking, to being different in the world than you are, Bradbury sort of hypothesizes a three-step process or three ways to get there. One is you can go to art or history, right, in the form of Faber and books. The second is you have a moment of your own humanity being triggered, right? Like in the face of this woman's self-immolating. And the third thing is you see a model for some other way of being in the world in the form of Clarice. There's someone living a life that's not like mine, that's not like anyone else I know, and she seems not just okay, but happy.

1:06:45And then he starts asking people, are they happy all the time? And everyone's like, no, no one's happy. But there's something else. So there's some possibility of a different way of being in the world. Any one of those things in literature sometimes is enough that Montag gets all three of them, I think is really fascinating to look at them that way.

1:07:01Jeff:And then he's just off. Yes. Man, it's such a, it is just such a compelling read all the way down. Yeah. And ultimately though, all three of them, and this you have here is like sympathy, empathy, and talking to other people, being bothered by the existence of other people and not like burning them down. Like talk to people, people. The seduction of Montag is through discussion. It's through interaction. It's through just sort of like, and not really having a purpose. It's not instrumental, his interactions with these people. They're just kind of pleasant and interesting. If there's an argument to this book, the first argument is not, we should make books available to everyone.

1:07:35Jeff:Books are important. That's part of it. But the top line argument is that your best weapon against these kinds of tools of oppression is imagination and empathy. Like being able to think of other realities and connect with other people and have ideas about them. And that, as you were saying, books are a vehicle for that. But also, as our colleague Kelly Jensen, who does a lot of our book banning coverage at Book Riot, talks about, it's not about the books. Like, the book bans are not about the books. Book bans are always about the ideas that books are vehicles for, and they're about attempting to suppress those ideas.

1:08:09Jeff:So our weapons are not just to try to make books available, but they have to be on the meta level of protecting the freedom of exchange of ideas and allowing people, not just allowing people to have interactions with each other where they can exchange ideas, but it requires that citizens actively choose to engage in those kinds of relationships and exchanges rather than opting into the numbing out of screens and technology and drugs and, you know, all the things that we see on the page in this book, but that we see in our reality. today too. Yeah. And maybe the first and foremost function of a book is the ability to sort of, quote unquote, talk to people across place and time, right?

1:08:48It's transportable consciousness is the best we have. Like Fran Leibowitz has said, this is the close we get to being in another mind. A book can be, insofar as something can be another person, a book is the closest thing to being that other person. And it's generally longer than you're talking to people in your real life, right? You spend nine hours reading Gilead and getting in the mind of Reverend Ames. talk to me about the last time you had an interaction with a person over time that that was intimate and they were talking to you honestly and openly over books just allow a different kind of engagement with the point of view of somebody else maybe there's other ways of doing that but

1:09:20Jeff:they're difficult they are quite difficult yeah and bradbury's own deep and eclectic reading habits are really on display in showing off a little even maybe i don't know i don't know in fahrenheit Yeah, 451. Doesn't mention a lot of ladies, but he does refer to Edna St. Vincent Millay. But there are references to, there's a quote, play the man, Master Ridley, which is a rallying cry from 1555 when two men were being burned at the stake during the Protestant Reformation. So he's reading that stuff. There's a quote from an Alexander Smith essay. There are references to Gulliver's travels. There's a reference to the life of Johnson by James Boswell, to Plato's Republic.

1:09:59Jeff:There's a lot about Dover Beach, an 1867 poem by Matthew Arnold, which is what Montag reads to Millie and her friends when they come over. And he's just kind of losing his shit. And he pulls the books out of the ventilator grill and he starts reciting Dover Beach. And that's what causes one of her friends to turn him in. And there are quotes from As You Like It and All's Well That Ends Well, multiple mentions of Shakespeare. Alexander Pope is referenced, and so is Sir Philip Sidney. And those are just the ones I clocked and thought to Google afterwards. I thought it was interesting that a lot of it was poetry.

1:10:35Poetry has its most direct roots in the oral tradition, and it's memorable and a lot of meant to be recited. So I was thinking about a book is different than a novel, right? A book is different than, it's not just a novel, but there's other kinds of books where it may be more or less amenable to being remembered, recited, retained in part or in whole. Essays, poetry. You know, we might do a quote or two, but we're more likely to remember a play, right? Like those are meant to be remembered for the actors on the stage or a shorter poem or something else like that. I took that as a notable sort of moment of look at the atomic units that are retained even outside of the books.

1:11:13They tend to be smaller and more memorable, and the book can do something else, but it's not just that. All right, stray thoughts, Rebecca, here. What occurred to you that maybe is outside the main of our argumented discussion and investigation of the ideas of the book itself?

1:11:25Jeff:The opening line of this book, it was a pleasure to burn, is on the Mount Rushmore of opening lines and among the most misused quotations. I agree with you on both counts. When it's misused, what do people think it means? I've seen it misused in places of like, like burning eroticism. Like it was a pleasure to burn. Or to burn with a gem-like flame. Like I think that's Walter Pater talking about like, like burning as a way of being in the world. Right. Like you're burning. But this is literal burning. This is Montag on his way to work to burn some people's books. And also a lie. It is not a pleasure to burn.

1:12:06Jeff:Like he, we find out that he hates it, that he is unhappy, but it was a pleasure to burn is like just an all timer up there with it was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking 13 up there within my younger and more vulnerable days. Call me Ishmael. The truth universally acknowledged that a young man with a good fortune must be. Yeah, it's up there. I agree with you. It's way up there. What else you got? I was also thinking about how interesting it is and reflective of the time that Bradbury was writing that in Fahrenheit 451, it's housewives like Millie who are the primary agents.

1:12:42Jeff:They're the ones who are addicted to screens. They are the ones who are most subject to this dissociation because the men are off at work and the women are just home all day watching these TV shows. This is the age of Betty Friedan and The Problem Without a Name. But if this were to be written today, like I think a 2026 spinoff would look closer to Parable of the Sower. And now the people that are like most dangerous with screen addictions and dissociation seem to be single white men.

1:13:19Jeff:Right.

1:13:42I actually think of that more as a year, but that's different a little bit. But the other contenders for me that are on the – if I'm doing the top three, I think Catch-22 and the Three Musketeers. Shoot me an email, zero2wellread at bookriot.com if there's something I missed. But that was just sort of off the dome of just have a number of their own. I think a lot of people do confuse Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451, by the way. I think they do, too. Who have not read either.

1:14:06Jeff:A really funny confusion. Yes, very funny confusion. My other stray thought was that the dialogue from the TV families sure sounds like AI-generated stories we're reading today where nothing actually happens. It's just like people yelling at each other or descriptions of heightened emotion, but no actual action or anything to hang your hat on. And it's just AI slop before AI slop existed. That the climactic moments of these shows on the room screens is not actual drama. It's just like flashes and sounds that are overwhelming to your nervous system until you can't think about anything else. You've never thought about it till right now.

1:14:47But when people, and I don't know people that watch soap operas as much. This is more of an older generation, grandparents and older aunts and great uncles and great aunts and stuff that would watch soaps. and they would refer to as I'm going to go home and watch my stories.

1:14:59Jeff:My stories. And there was something about that phrase that always bothered me. And I think it's Fahrenheit 451. I think it's that cross identification as if they're theirs. They're not yours. Those aren't your stories. Yeah. And we're parasocial. A little too much. I didn't realize it, but a little too much parasocial personal investment where you're mistaking this one way transmission with some kind of a relationship at one time. So anyway, my other stray thought is, who is oppression for? One thing we don't often see in these dystopian novels is the scenes rooms where the enjoyers of the regime reside.

1:15:32We don't really see it in 1984. We sort of see it a little bit in Handmaid's Tale, but it's mostly from the perspective of, anyway, we're not going to spoil, I don't want to spoil everything's here. We don't see in Parable of the Sores. And that got me thinking of The Hunger Games. And one thing Suzanne Collins does that does seem to me different there is we get a lot of time in, I think, the Capitol or District 1, I can't remember the specifics, like the whole Hunger Games is really for the people and that becomes a micro class. But we see them interacting, we see their style, we see their perversions, like kind of up close and personal.

1:16:03I don't think we get anyone in this book, Fahrenheit 451, Rebecca, that is like, ah, yes, here is this person in the center of the imperial. Like everything's going according to my, and everything's grand. Everyone we encounter. And that's why I'll save my hot take. That leads to my hot take here in a minute. But that's one thing that struck me is like often the dystopians, we don't see the, And I don't know if that's good or bad, right? I don't know if, I don't know. I'm just not sure.

1:16:29Jeff:I think it can be really helpful because, and I even said it earlier, like, when we're talking about the shady powers that be, or when other people are talking about them, we end up saying things like, you know, they don't want you to have whatever. But depictions like Collins gives in The Hunger Games allow us to say, who is they? Like, who are the people that benefit from these systems or that benefit from you having your earbuds in for 24 hours a day or not paying attention to the news or whatever it is? It can be helpful to see, like we get to see Elon Musk on his yacht at the same time that people are starving.

1:17:05Jeff:You know, like we see it in reality and it can be helpful in fiction to see that too. Yeah, I agree with you on that one. Notable quotes, Rebecca. We've got a bunch here. We got to be strategic a little bit with you. Well, I'll just say Goodreads really whiffs on the most popular one here. Goodreads have been doing fine. They've been doing okay the last several episodes. But the number one quote from this book on Goodreads is, why is it, he said one time at the subway entrance, I feel I've known you so many years. He's talking to Clarice here. And she says, because I like you, she said, and I don't want anything from you.

1:17:39I would argue this might be the worst moment in Fahrenheit 451. It's just on the nose. You don't need to say it.

1:17:46Jeff:Yeah. The you get one tattoo quote is stuff your eyes with wonder. He said, live as if you drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees. Ask for no security. There never was such an animal. And this is one of the old professors, one of the book people out in the forest. I clocked this one as well. If you dropped it in 10 seconds, I've always wondered about this idea. And we both have recently read Vincent Yu's Seek Immediate Shelter, which suggests that sometimes if you do what you think you do what you do and you're going to die in 10 seconds, it doesn't always go great.

1:18:22So I might read against the grain. But that, yes, there is no guarantees. Ask for no security. There never was such an animal. And that gets to one of my sort of ongoing memories of most dystopian fiction and even the world in which I live is the amount of effort it takes for the regime to keep power is unsustainable. So it's also true on the other side of the equation. Like to have this amount of control over time takes violence. It takes effort. It takes a kind of uniformity of vision that might be impossible. Like this is the old Jurassic Park lesson, right? Like there's two, you're trying to control a chaotic system.

1:19:00Like it's not going to work the way you think it's going to do eventually.

1:19:03Jeff:Yeah. The one that I expected to be number one on Goodreads is there must be something in books, something we can't imagine to make a woman stay in a burning house. There must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. Right. I did the bothered one already. let me see what i want to do if there's something here just one little thing out of the whole mess of things maybe we can pass it on to someone else this is the book people right the smallness of that endeavor right this is not you know i'm going to be i'm going to lead the revolution i'm not going to be katniss everdeen i'm not going to be one of the deliberators i can be a part of movements toward the good, the beautiful, and the true, and the just, if I just carry my little verse with me, right?

1:19:49This is Mr. Keating, that the powerful play goes on, and we shall contribute. That seems more achievable than I'm going to solve climate change by myself somehow. It's like, okay, one way of encountering the difficulty of feeling like you're powerless is pass on, take something of value, take something that's sustaining, and pass it along in some way or another. What else do you want to do?

1:20:13Jeff:Writers have been worried for a long time that books were getting worse and we were getting dumber. So once books appealed to a few people here, there, everywhere, they could afford to be different. The world was roomy, but then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths, double, triple, quadruple population, film and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste-putting norm. This is, again, 1950 when he starts writing this, 1951. We wring our hands about this today. There are op-eds about this right now in major publications. And it's not that it's not real, but this is a perpetual concern for the literary community.

1:20:58Rebecca, anything else you want to hit there before we get to for you, if it's not for you?

1:21:02Jeff:No, gosh, there's just so many good lines in this one. It's for you. I mean, book people, it's not hard. You can get one of these under your belt if you've never read it before. I also think as we're getting to, it's more here than book burning is bad. This is not really a book. Book burning is just stage one of a multi-stage rocket trying to blast us into a different understanding of the world. Yeah, but like a powerful argument and a really powerful, fast-moving story. 150 pages, you can read it in a couple hours. I'm really hard pressed to think of a why not. Yeah, I don't have a good one. Let's see.

1:21:38The immortal questions that are asked, which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? Sorry, I'm laughing. Each one is like more relevant than the last one. Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I and who are my people? The only one I don't think is dealing with directly or like powerfully is how to deal with the certainty of death.

1:22:01Jeff:Yeah. Yeah. Everything else is like, wow. It's driven by that there's a yes answer to free will. Yes. Free will. Yes. Who am I? Montag is certainly figuring it out. I think that what is the good life is the driving one here. He's unhappy. Everyone around him is unhappy. The solutions that everyone else has chosen of stop reading books because they're difficult and just put your earbuds in and space out is also not working. So he's gone looking for Clarice seems like there's something going on there and she seems like she's doing okay. And why might that be? Maybe it's the books. Yeah. Yeah. I think the one that, I think the, what is the good life plus what else might there be is an interesting to yoke those together, which is there, the image of the good life we don't really get.

1:22:55It's sort of inferred in the home of Clarice, being amongst the book people, their current mode of existence is not the good life. That is a staging area that is a lying in wait or something. But then there's some other Eden yet to be discovered or fostered or otherwise. So we don't get a real example. It's more of a counter. It's not this. This whole thing, this ain't it.

1:23:20Jeff:This ain't working, yeah. Rebecca, I'm not sure this is about art and writing. Make a case. It's going to be tough for you, but give it a scout. My note in our agenda for Are We Sure This Isn't About Art and Writing is just LOL. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Could you get the most of the gist from watching the A Signal adaptation? There's not really a Signal adaptation anymore. There was a 1966 film by Francois Truffaut that was well-reviewed. Bradbury participated in the making of it. But one of the decisions Truffaut made was that the story is presented as pretty low tech. It doesn't look futuristic.

1:23:58Jeff:So now it looks like a movie from 1966. There's also a film from 2018 by Ramin Barani and Amir Naderi that starred Michael B. Jordan as Guy Montag, and it bricked. So we are actually due for - Did you watch that? No. I never watched it either. I don't know if it's good or underrated or what, but it did nothing. I don't know why. I could not find a respected reviewer who thought it was decent.

1:24:26So there's space for signal adaptation. Rebecca, movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets?

1:24:32Jeff:I mean, I think we really have to take another swing at this. And I think a movie is the right vehicle for how fast it moves. Just like pack it into 100 minutes and call it a day. Ridley Scott, Lord and Miller, the guy who created Black Mirror, his name is Charlie Brooker. Like surely A24 has somebody in their stable for this. What do you think? I think Ridley Scott, he's getting up there. But like there is a Blade Runner element to the futurity of this that would make sense. Are we sure it's not Nolan? Now, again, I'm Odyssey-pilled right now. The movie hasn't come out yet. But in looking at the kinds of movies he likes to make, he is very interested in like infrastructure, like buildings and ships and technology and a chase.

1:25:15and I think he brings a certain visual style that I think the idea of the fire against these dystopian backdrops, I think he could handle quite well at the same time.

1:25:27Jeff:I'm not going to fight with you about a Christopher Nolan pick. I would be a billion percent on board and especially everything here is practical effects. You just need a guy in a cool suit and a flamethrower. He'd build a hound. He'd build a 60-foot cyclops. He could build a hound. Yeah. That would be great. But this is let's get Hollywood on this. It's time for a real moment for Fahrenheit 451. Miscellaneous, trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributive quotes and more. Rebecca, what did you find? What nuts did you find in your exploration? Well, I told the story about typing it out on the UCLA library already.

1:26:01Jeff:A couple little fun nuggets. Montag is named after a paper company. And Faber is a pencil manufacturer. And Bradbury didn't realize until years later that those were just names from his unconscious because he had all these reams of paper and pencils around his house. But here is the real winner that came out of the last interview. Early in his adulthood, Bradbury is riding the bus to UCLA one day. He sits down next to a young man who's reading science fiction. He's got his science fiction books. And Bradbury asks him, are you a member of the UCLA Sci-Fi Club? The young man says yes. Bradbury asks him, who are your favorite writers?

1:26:42Jeff:The guy starts listing off writers and one of them is Ray Bradbury. So Bradbury says, oh, Ray Bradbury, would you like to meet him? And the young man, of course, says yes. And Bradbury's like, ta-da! And as they start talking, Bradbury asks the young man his name. It is Ernest Hemingway's son. Wow. That's a good one. I thought so. One that I had, and this is work from home dad core, is the reason he went to the UCLA library is because he was working in the garage and he had young daughters and they kept tapping on the glass saying, come play. And he would always want to go play and he would go play, which I like getting misty just thinking about that.

1:27:20But, you know, a room of one's own doesn't just apply to, you know, there's a reason a room of one's own by Virginia Woolf is real. Like that's real for creative people of all kinds. And dudes were figuring out and able to figure out and given the latitude to figure out. and this was Radbury, someone had to stay home with the girls right then. You know, just notice that at the same time, I think is important to mention.

1:27:39Jeff:He said later that he regretted killing Clarice. It's implied in the book that she's dead. And he said if he could do it over, he would bring her back. She is alive at the end of the 1966 film. So he kind of got his shot there with the Truffaut adaptation. What do you make of that as a reader, as an experience of this? Because it's already hopeful. Like, he doesn't like fridging her, I guess, to use a modern parlance or something like that. But like, she's not the only one that dies here. She's not the only subject of this. I'm not sure what to make of this. I can take it or leave it, I think.

1:28:09Jeff:If she had shown up with the book people, that would have been cool. But because we're already on a hopeful note, you know, like, I didn't, I did not feel devastated that she had died. It kind of makes sense in the world that they live in that she, like, she's punished, even if it's not directly for what she's engaged in. That's kind of where I came down on it, too, is that there's other modes of enforcement than aren't just books. Like, they're looking for other slippages, other small and large resistances. It isn't just as simple as, well, if you don't have a book, you can get away with it forever.

1:28:44Like, you can do whatever you're going to do.

1:28:46Jeff:Another real moment of old school publishing that I don't think happens anymore. We heard it with Douglas Adams, where he was behind his deadline and his editor went and, like, locked him in a hotel room. when Bradbury was on deadline for the expanded version that became the book in 1953, his editor from Ballantyne flew to LA and stayed with him for more than a week to get him to finish the damn thing. Yes. Got on a plane. The other one I had in terms of how the sausage made can inform our understanding and enjoyment of the sausage is the original version of Fahrenheit 451 had a couple of short stories packaged with it together because he was under, Bradbury was already under contract for another publisher for his next quote unquote novel.

1:29:30So that to make this a collection of short stories was kind of like Prince reneging himself the chemical sign for boron or whatever. I don't even remember the shape of that thing. If people don't know, Prince did that to get out of a Sony contract, right? So there, sometimes artistic choices are not just the wellspring of a genius, right? You know, like sometimes it's logistical and instrumental to deal with the world that works. We each have one hot take here. You go first, Rebecca.

1:29:58Jeff:Okay, I think this would hit even harder and feel more true today if it centered the people who actually do most literary activism work, and that's women. So I'd be looking for Parable of the Sower, but about books, really. This is largely going to bleed into office hours. We're going to talk about characters in more detail. But my hot take is Captain Beattie is the most interesting, important character in the book. He is the foreperson of the fire squad, Montag's direct supervisor, and his own journey, behavior, and end is fascinating. So I'll save that a little bit. Further reading, read-alikes, books inspired by this one, other artistic works that connect to it.

1:30:34Jeff:You can go so many places with this. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Kessler and Dover Beach. We both name-checked both of those already. Those are the works that directly inspired Bradbury's writing. Plato's Republic and the idea of the cave come up in the text. And then The Memory Police by Yoko Agawa is name checked online quite frequently as not an exact mapping, but a similar kind of story doing the same kinds of work that Fahrenheit 451 is doing. I mean, I think it's in a lineage of war stories where the soldier is like, I'm not sure I should be doing this. Any book that's like, I'm not sure I should be doing this.

1:31:11Again, I've said before, Or my favorite, the initial version is Book Nine and the Iliad where Achilles is like, wait a minute, this system is screwed up. I don't want to participate in it. The thing that induces him is less savory than humanity or something else. We'll get to the Iliad someday. But I think this is not a trope. It's a repeated thing you see in war stories, like especially Vietnam stories or like Tim O 'Brien often or Carl Morilantes or Alquhart on the Western Front. You get these seeds of like, boy, this can't be right. And sometimes it's taken to the extremity in which someone needs to get taken to the extremity to realize that they'd like to change their life.

1:31:46So what other zero-to-well-read titles does it connect to, Rebecca?

1:31:49Jeff:I mean, we've talked about 1984. We've talked about Parable of the Sower. Those are really direct connections. If you just like this sort of futuristic speculative fiction that deals with what makes us human and empathy and connection, Never Let Me Go is a good one. And I think more obliquely Vineland, which is also about people living in a different version, but of a fascist society trying to figure out if and how to rebel or if, as we concluded at the end of the book, should you just go out into the woods and smoke some weed and wait them out? I had Little Women for kind of a specific reason, but I was trying to imagine Clarice's household.

1:32:32I think it's sort of filled with light and ideas and energy, and they sort of live to the beat of their own drum. And one thing that I think we both really responded to in Little Women is how the March family household was put together. They weren't like other families. They're not like other girls, I guess. It's literally in figure. But like they're living a life of joy and of art and of altruism and of a matriarchal kind of household, frankly, that is outside the norm. And it allows some space for Joe specifically to live a different kind of life. So how can these scenes of domestic resistance, this maybe tell you something about my own house and how I think about our own life, I think is very interesting.

1:33:17Like how can you create a pocket or a bubble or a safety zone or a world in which you're not, you're not, they're also not, they're not hermits, right? They're not out there in the woods. They're engaged with the world, but they're not subject to it all the time already. So that's one I was thinking about, especially as Clarice is so interesting.

1:33:34Jeff:I saw this in the notes and I was like, where is he going to do this? Yeah, I saved that. I was like, I wonder if she's, does that make sense or am I really off the script for that? No, I think it does. It's like a, it's a, it's not an obvious reach, but it makes sense. Yeah, it's not the main of it, but I think because I was trying to think of other ways to center Clarice in my own thinking because Bradbury was, that's something else that I got to. All right. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet, three to five takeaways from our reading of Fahrenheit 451. I'll run back my take from 1984. Intellectual freedom is the root of all other freedoms.

1:34:05Jeff:And the greatest danger isn't war and politics, but the unexamined life and the things that distract us from the world. It's that choice to not examine. It's the choice to, you know, tune out that makes people susceptible to all of the other dangerous and dangerous things and attempts at control. and not because i want to be a contrarian but i think for something that has its own cultural weight like fahrenheit 451 my my takeaway is that ideas are more important important than books not that books are unimportant they are means to an end but a lot of people's understanding of like book burning is like the worst like it's the ultimate sign of fascism blah blah blah blah again i'm no i'm no fan of book bans or book burning but like you say it's only a system but the thing we want to protect and if it is in the form of books wonderful but if it is in the form of something else.

1:34:53There are other forms it can take, but ideas, exchange of ideas, how to be different, a liberty of the mind and the freedom to say things that may be uncomfortable to others on an ongoing basis. Again, it's a version of what you're saying, intellectual freedom. Do not mistake the technology for what we want the technology to do. Yeah.

1:35:12Jeff:And I think Bradbury would agree with that. Oh, I think he says it explicitly several times, right? Because ultimately, the people became the vessel, right? What happens in the course of Fahrenheit 451 is the vessel changes from the book to the person. Final beat, a zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. Historical importance is really hard to deal with on this one because, well, am I wrong? I find this kind of hard to understand, historical importance. No, I think this is hard to nail down. Like, it's not a 10, but it continues to be important.

1:35:50Jeff:It predicts a lot of things. It's a warning call. And it's in that upper echelon of dystopian novels that we recognize in our present day. Well, you know what? That argues for being a 10, actually. Now that you say it, you throw that back at me. Because did we give an 84 a 10? I don't remember. But I'm down to give Fahrenheit 451 a 10. It's been historically important to me. Yeah. Well, the argument that I have, not argument, the thing that often lowers a score for a more modern book is it's not the Odyssey, right? It doesn't have 2 ,000 years of things being influenced by it. But if you situate it within the world of, say, science fiction, right, it's an early example.

1:36:33It's one of them, maybe a nine, nine and a half, just because if it was 500 BCE, I do think there's only a few tens in historical porn. but I'll give this a nine for sure.

1:36:42Jeff:Okay. Readability, nine. That's a nine. Yeah, that's high. There is like some interesting vocabulary that is not totally obvious or might be unfamiliar to people. This book is where I learned the word proboscis. I remember being 13 and being like, what is that? And having to picture this mechanical hound like, oh, it's a long snout. Got it. Long snout. Yeah. Current relevance of central questions, I'm happy with a 10 here. 11, giraffe, I don't know what to say. 75, 42. Yeah, 42. to. Book nerd read cred, Rebecca. Talk to me about this one because I don't know. It is so well known. Yeah. I feel like it's hiding in plain sight a little bit.

1:37:22It's so well known. Yeah.

1:37:25Jeff:Maybe six? Seven? Yeah. Six, seven? Let's go six. Six, seven. Oh, damn factor. I have never yet read this book and not put it down and been like, damn he does it there are moments that are just really stunning the image for me of the book people out in the forest like this is an enduring thing that i picture like those that struck me again this time too i think when i read it 15 i didn't that's i don't have a memory of my own reaction to that but i've come to appreciate that more and more and the literal and figurative fireworks that happened early. I think what's left in the ashes is something I care about more as an older person than I did at the same time.

1:38:10I'm happy with a nine.

1:38:12Jeff:Let's give it a nine. High scores for Fahrenheit 451. I don't know that I would have thought coming into this, I was surprised by the book. I guess I didn't say that at the top. In my second review, I was surprised by the book. It's been like 30 years for you. So that's a big... three years, I think 14 or 15 when I read that. I was a much different person, much different reader, and much different reading experiences. And I do think the feature and the bug of the power of the image of firefighters burning books, I think can give you sort of retinal burn to see what else is in the text. Yeah. So anyway.

1:38:48Alright, thank you very much, Rebecca. You can go to patreon.com slash Jules Too Well Read for guided readalongs, bonus content, and membership options for this episode. We're going to be looking at characters specifically, I have my, I want to talk about Captain Beattie in some detail at the time with you if you're interested, but also get into Millie and Clarice and some of their characters, a little bit more of a close reading through the lens of specific figures in the book. You can follow us on socials at Zero to Well Read podcast. Shoot us an email, zero to well read at bookriot.com. I am finding myself especially interested in your own stories, listeners of encountering these books.

1:39:23I find that quite interesting, your own reaction. We got a really interesting one that didn't make it in time for the most recent mailbag. We'll come to another about someone's, I think, husband who was a chef who had a different relationship to Anthony Bourdain, which is cool. Like, yeah, share that as it goes on. But you we got you know, we had people talk to us or emails about forever and reading with their mom. And I just find those very interesting and anecdated. And so we're so isolated as readers so much of the time. I love to hear your own stories and maybe coming out of Fahrenheit 451.

1:39:53I want to hear people's stories about the relationship with books and ideas. Thank you so much to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. I will have mentioned in the pre-roll, I really recommend the 60th anniversary edition. I did this in print, which is unusual for me. But there's just a lot of interesting supporting materials at the end that I think it's worth having. And then finally, Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. We did it. We got one of your canonical books under our belt.

1:40:23Jeff:One of my all timers. I'm so glad to have done this one. Did we do it justice? I feel pretty good about this. I have to say. I think we did great. I like, you know, really felt in my bag on this one. And it's such a fun book to talk about. There's so much here. There's so much here. All right. Thank you all. We'll talk to you later.