Reading Week: "It was a pleasure to burn."

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Karli and I are taking a break in Palm Springs this week - well, Palm Desert, to be accurate, at a rental condo in a gated community, with easy access to a shared pool and hot tub. Generally my vacations tend to be migratory, to the point that I've gone on trips where I didn't sleep in the same bed twice, but this trip is intended to be more about relaxation than exploration. As such, I'm looking forward to spending some time with the written word over the course of the week.

After picking up our rental car, we've stopped off at Target to do some casual shopping and pick up some supplies.  As we wander through the store, we stop at the book section, where Karli selects a Jodi Picoult book for poolside reading.  To my surprise,  there's a trade paperback copy of Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451 on the Sale shelf, which I instantly add to our basket.*  There’s a kind of casual irony in purchasing this book here - one feels that in Bradbury’s future of outlawed books, Target would be the last place you would find any work of fiction, let alone this one.

Reading the book over the course of the day (it's a quick read at 158 pages, the bulk of this particular printing is made up of commentary) I'm impressed by the poetic brilliance of Bradbury's style, as always.  I'd also forgotten the tragic feel of the novel.  As per Thoreau, Fireman Guy Montag leads a life of quiet desperation, flat and colourless: isolated from his wife, apparently without friends, doubtful of the rightness of his vocation as a fireman who starts fires rather than stopping them, almost indifferent to the ongoing state of war that stands as a constant background.

Fahrenheit 451 is a conflict between two philosophies: thought and complacency.  To Bradbury, the elimination of books is the elimination of thinking, and with the loss of thought, the end of dissent and freedom.  All that is left is the shallow and trivial televised world that obsesses Montag's wife Mildred and her friends, and insulates them from anything that might make them question the status quo.

Regardless of whether or not this is a future that we might ever actually see, this book strikes very close to home for me.

Why?  Because I would undoubtedly be one of the criminals caught with a hoard of illegal books, one of the people who ends up in jail after their library is reduced to charred ashes, swirling in the wind around the skeletal remains of their home.  Or would I refuse to surrender, like the nameless woman who contemptuously stands her ground and dies with her books?

More likely, I might well be one of the quiet rebels who abandons society to live in the woods, becoming a sort of living edition of a memorized book.  Imagine being the last copy of The Lord of the Rings...

- Sid

* Considering that I own between five and six thousand books, you might be surprised that I don't already own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, but there are a few classic science fiction novels that I read early in my fandom and never added to my library.  For example, I don't own a copy of Brave New World, although it's probably time for a reread.  In this case, when we returned to Vancouver, I ruefully discovered that I actually did own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, the 50th anniversary paperback.  Now that I have that and the commemorative 60th edition, hopefully I can skip buying the 70th anniversary issue in 2023.

Reading Week: "All of time and space..."

 

SARAH: It wasn't Croydon. Where you dropped me off, that wasn't Croydon.
DOCTOR: Where was it?
SARAH: Aberdeen.
DOCTOR: Right. That's next to Croydon, isn't it?*

Doctor Who, School Reunion

CLARA: This isn't my home, by the way.
DOCTOR: Sorry. I'm sorry about that. I missed.
CLARA: Where are we?
DOCTOR: Glasgow, I think.

Doctor Who, Deep Breath

As someone who is generally a bit cautious about public displays of fandom, I have a certain admiration for the Palm Springs Uber driver in front of us, although I'm not sure that the Doctor is the best example to follow in that line of work.  True, he does frequently give people rides, but I think that most Uber clients have a sort of general expectation that they'll be dropped off at the right destination, not to mention the right century.

- Sid

* For those of you unfamiliar with Croydon - or Aberdeen - they're about 600 miles apart. By intergalactic standards, this is actually unbelievably accurate.

Reading Week: "Please put all electronic devices on airplane mode."

Saturday morning in Vancouver, and Karli and I are sitting on the tarmac at YVR, waiting to start a one-week getaway in sunny Palm Springs, a welcome break from the uncertain weather of British Columbia in the spring.

Although I do a lot of casual travel reading on my iPhone, I like to have a paper book for planes - flight attendants seem to be happier if you're not using your phone at takeoff, airplane mode or not, and it's also a good opportunity to catch up on some reading.

My seatmate on the aisle side is perusing The Untethered Soul, a New York Times best seller from 2007 -  not exactly current, but a far cry from my 1960 vintage Badger Books paperback copy of The Brain Stealers*, by Murray Leinster, which I pulled out of my tsundoku stack for the trip, along with a couple of other selections that caught my eye.  By some standards, this might be a valued antique, although it's hardly in mint condition, and only cost me a pound or thereabouts last year at a used book store in London's Portobello Market.

As is common with books from this era, the cover has absolutely no relationship to the story:** I have no idea who the glowing woman is supposed to be, and the villains are globular pink bloodsucking alien mind parasites (think Wilson with little fangs).  The hero of the story protects himself from their mind control powers with a cap made out of coiled iron wire while he builds a brain jamming machine to defeat them - tin foil has been available for hat creation since 1910, but you can't always depend on being in the kitchen when crunch time hits.

Looking casually around the plane, it occurs to me that you rarely see anyone reading a notably old book in public.  I can't be the only person with a nostalgic affection for classic novels, but even being a bit of a collector aside, I don't think I've recently seen anyone on a plane flipping through The Godfather, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Hotel New Hampshire, or any of a hundred different best sellers from the past.  It may just be that fame is fleeting, and that the general public will read a book once on vacation and then donate it to Goodwill or a book donation bin for hospital libraries, or maybe drop it off at a used bookstore, where someone like me brings it home to complete the circle twenty years later - or, in this case, 59.

- Sid

* Which, oddly, contains four pages of advertising, including a fascinating opportunity to purchase Joan the Wad, "Queen of the Lucky Cornish Pixies", and offers to both increase and reduce your bust using a "harmless vegetable cream" - well, two different creams, to be clear, it would be asking a lot for one product to provide both of those services.

**  There's actually a sound economic reason for this.  Pulp magazine and book publishers would often contact an artist and order generic paintings in bulk, then somewhat randomly assign them to covers.