- Hey!
- Hi. Welcome to our online discussion,
Facebook live of Fahrenheit 451,
Big Read Wichita's selection.
I'm librarian Sara.
- I'm librarian Racine.
- And I am Suzanne Tobias.
I'm a reporter with the Wichita
Eagle. I'm so happy to be here.
- And we are so glad that
you are here to discuss
this really groundbreaking and important
book and I hope all of you have read it.
And if you haven't, you need to probably
do that ASAP.
- Yes. There are copies all over town.
It's easy to find.
- Literally. Actually, fun
story: if you see one of these where it
says, "don't read this book," we actually
want you to read it. We've hidden a
couple copies of these around town at
coffee shops and restaurants and
different places where people can
congregate and discuss things. So if you
see it, feel free to read it and then
pass it on. We'd love you to write your
name on it, maybe tweet a picture of it
or share it on Facebook of
you with the book.
- Because there's nothing that makes
you want to read a book more than
seeing, "do not read this book."
- Absolutely.
- That's awesome, you guys. What a
great idea.
- And on the back, it does say, "please
leave this book somewhere, anywhere" for
someone else to find because we want to
spread the literary resistance. That's
what we're calling it. Straight out of
Hunger Games, talking about how the
Hunger Games, it's like this book but
you know the three fingers, literary
resistance. Very important.
OK, so let's jump right in. This book, for
those of you that haven't or just to
maybe refresh your memory, is about a
society where reading and really
curiosity has been completely outlawed...
or it's actually been replaced by
giant wall televisions where people can
talk to this online... or not online, but
this televised group --
- Family that becomes your family 
and you have little seashells in
their ears, which struck me as incredibly
ahead of its time.
- I know, right?
- Because they're earbuds essentially
that you wear all the time.
- And so by outlawing all these 
things, they've made society completely
even-keeled, right? Everybody's equal,
ignorance is bliss, and if we find books
in your possession, we will burn down your
entire house and you are going to jail
along with your entire family.
And neighbors are turning in
neighbors, friends are turning in friends.
So it's a very much a... what is it, a police state?
- Dystopian.
- Yeah, very dystopian, yes.
- And so what else would you do but sit in
front of a TV and talk to your pretend
family and listen to ear buds all the time?
So this story actually follows Guy
Montag, who is a fireman who is... those
are the folks that will actually go in
and burn your house down for you.
- Firemen in this world,
firemen actually start fires
instead of putting them out and their 
tanks have kerosene instead of water.
- Right. We start out with him and
we follow his journey
to discover that books maybe are a
little bit more than what he'd always
thought that they were, that maybe
there's something behind learning and
reading and enjoying the written word.
And so anyway, we'll just jump right in.
That's what this book is about.
- It struck me as... I just want to say this 
was just such a perfectly timed choice,
I think, for where
we are right now in society. I mean
there's... with reality TV and all of the
things tearing people away,
people aren't
reading as much as... we know they're
not they're not reading books as much as
they were before. They're reading
online or reading little snippets
of things and so I just think it's
really interesting to talk about that
topic in general: what do books
bring to our lives and why should we be
spending our time reading?
- Well, and everybody's free time is so valuable.
- Absolutely.
- And so one of the things that
we were talking about were some tips
that we had for reading: set aside 20
minutes in your household every day and
whoever's there, they're turning
off TVs or anything
electronic and cracking open a book.
And if you have that set, maybe
after dinner everybody grabs their book
and reads for a little bit. And parents
who read model that behavior for
their kids, are more likely to raise
readers. So... sorry, I'm off
my soapbox.
- No, I mean, we talk so much
about... that it's important to
read, it's important raising a
reader and there's all these initiatives
and every parent knows that we need to
be reading to our kids, but to really
think about how
important it is for our souls and
and then society in general, for people
to read, I think we need to remind
ourselves of that every now and then too
and I think that's obviously what this
book does.
- Well, and they say that reading
fiction makes you a more empathetic
person and think about these people who
are living in a society where fiction
has been completely outlawed because
they've replaced it with TV, with
all these things and they're depressed.
They are not a happy society.
- But the idea is that taking away these
things, the idea is when he reads at one
point, Guy Montag reads Dover Beach, the
poem Dover Beach to his wife and her
friends in their house and he
just loves the language of it and
he's reading these lines of this poem
and this is when he's starting to
discover that there's something
more here and their reaction is like,
"That made me sad. Put it away. How dare
you make me sad. Let's just put
that away." And I've had those
experiences with people too where it's
just like, can we just read something
more happy? This book brings me
down. But it's those books that just
really, really make you feel deeply.
- Move you. Yes, absolutely.
- And too,  I think that their...
I was thinking their reaction was
more like, "I'm thinking and it hurts
my brain. Make it stop."
- Yeah, there's a little of that, too, yeah.
- And so I understand where you're...
so it's like maybe it's a combination
of the two.
- Because they are so used to being fed their entertainment and yet having to...
just looking and passively
staring at a screen or listening.
It's frightening. Because this
could actually happen!
The whole time I'm reading this 
going, "OK. Yeah, this could
actually..." You know, we are not far from this, really.
- OK, so he had a bead on the seashells
that people put in their ears that were
like earbuds, the parlor TVs which were
entire walls of people's homes which I
have a very... no, I would never have dreamt
that we'd have a TV that big.
- Right. And it was written in the '50s... what was the year?
- I think it was 1948?
- Was it?
I thought it was '53.
- Oh, '53, sorry.
- All right, so there are TVs but this
vision of these wall TVs had to be --
- And we were talking about, they
watched the family and they interact
with the family. I was thinking the
family had a correlation to nowadays
with the Kardashians.
- Oh yeah!
- Really any reality TV. I've been thinking 
on this since we were discussing it.
Yeah, any reality TV. I mean --
- You become invested in the characters. 
Or it's The Voice or MasterChef or
whatever. You start rooting for people.
You get to know personalities and you --
- Feel like you actually know them.
- Exactly. But that's how you feel when you're
reading a book, too, when
you think about it.
- It's true.
- But it's not as sort of passive.
- But you're also thinking and
you're like root... I don't know.
It's the same but it's different.
- Yes. That is...
- Profound?
- #deepthoughts
It's the same and also different.
- And if you have any thoughts on
anything that we're discussing, please
feel free to comment along. We would love
to have you join our conversation. So
anyway, I'll just throw that out there.
Now, one thing that really
struck me throughout the whole
two-thirds of the book -- I guess the first
two-thirds -- was the captain, right? Beatty.
He is so well-read and he can just
spout off Shakespeare and all of
these different books and poems and
stories, but it's always in a way that's
like, "No, books are still bad. You're
gonna read them, everybody goes through
this. You're gonna read it and you're
gonna hate it and you're gonna see it's all
fluff and awful."
- It confused me so much as a reader.
I was really trying to figure
him out because -- and I know there's
sort of a deeper meaning there
that I can't wait to get your thoughts
on because I'm thinking he obviously
cared. I admire people so much who can
remember lines, passages from books
because I cannot. There are very, very,
very few. Like the ones I had to memorize
as a kid sort of come to mind sometimes. And
the prologue to the Canterbury Tales,
only the first two lines. But so people
who can do that really impress me and I
think that it must mean something to
them if they take the time to
memorize it and yet here he was spouting
off these lines of literature and just
saying, "Yeah, yeah. I know the game,
but it's not worth your time."
- But I really like what you
said and I want to come
back to the whole memorization thing
a little bit later because that's
the other thing I wanted to
talk about, but I
think you're absolutely right that
you put forth that effort to remember
something because it's meaningful to you.
But if you hate it... I just can't
imagine myself going to that trouble if
it's something that bothers me so much
as a way to prove my argument.
- And I think that -- we were kind of
chatting about this earlier: Beatty, who's
Guy's boss, he's talking about all of the
firemen go through this. Well, do they
really? And he must have really
gone through this and he loves it so
much, yet he puts it down. It almost
sounds like he's disillusioned with reading
or knowledge, that some way
somehow it's disappointed him or made
him bitter. Or how you loved something
so much that you clutch onto it,
but then something --
- Something happened that we
don't know, or he wanted to
maintain that sort of superiority:
"I know this and you don't."
- That's kind of how I felt, I think.
- "I know this stuff" --
- Backwards and forwards.
- "Trust me, it's not worth your time."
- "I'm authority, you're not. I get to know it."
- We see that all the time.
We see that in personalities and...
- And if he was disillusioned,
just come find a librarian.
- And that's the message here today, 
folks: if you are disillusioned,
come to the library where
all of your troubles will leave you.
- I won't lie. It's not a lie.
- It's healing.
- But anyway, yeah, I think
it's really interesting that he would...
because he does, he hates it and
it's almost like he's setting Guy up to
fail because he's like, "Let me spout all
this wonderful language to you, but
you're gonna hate it."
- And intrigue you with it.
- It's really, really great, but you're
gonna hate it. And I get to know it, but
you're gonna hate it. And
there's something boiling
under the surface --
- It's like a parent, like a bad
parent, isn't it?
Like, "We'll talk about that when
you're grown up, when you're a grown up.
We know this stuff and you don't, but
it's all right." It's very frustrating and
Guy sort of has that feeling, I
think like --
- And he has the teenager rebellion.
- Yes, very much so.
- In his 30s. It's fine.
- Yeah, its fine.
- Well, OK. Guy, speaking of
teenager, he meets Clarisse,
the girl.
- Yes, and I wanted her to come back.
- I know! It was very abrupt. Her
leaving was very abrupt.
- Well, in one of the groups that I talked to,
they were kind of... they were like, "Oh, this
book is so disjointed," or, "you know,
there's fits and starts and stops."
Clarisse is there, then she's
gone and I was wondering how you felt
about that. Did that bug you in reading it?
- It was frustrating, but now I see that
she just basically set up his
his whole different perspective.
- She was very much a catalyst in his whole
journey towards... it was boiling under the 
surface. He was already hoarding books
in his vent, right? And which they allude to 
kind of at the very beginning, so he's
already doing this and then she's like, "No, 
but look - the moon! Haven't you ever just
walked around and felt a breeze
and smelled the wood?"
- Which was so odd in
this society for someone to be wandering
around on their own, like just taking a walk.
One scene that really struck me was when 
he was running away and this group of
teenagers just wants to
hit him in the middle of the street
because he's walking. He's just
walking and they're like, "That's weird."
- "He's a weirdo."
- "I'm going to hit you with
my car going 120 miles an hour."
- These cars go really fast in this nove.
- Just imagine this tiny, little --
- But think about it. Think about...
and I was just in a
waiting room, a dentist's waiting room
this morning and I looked around having
read this book just recently and...
no one just sits anymore and there's a
line in here too like, do we...
"Oh, but we have plenty of off hours. Off
hours, yes. But time to think?" I love that
line because yes, we have all this free
time but everyone's either
on their phone, there's every waiting
room you're in has a screen.
- Guilty. Very guilty.
- I actually brought my book,
you know, a different book that
I'm... reading tips: 'cause that's the other
trick to get more reading in is always
have one with you because you are
always in line somewhere or waiting for
something and it's good to pop it out.
- Library plug. That's why I really
like our e-books, which you
can download to your phone.
- So these people on
their phones could have been
reading. I'll give them the benefit of the 
doubt. It's just so odd anymore to see
someone sitting and watching and it
does sort of make you suspicious of them.
- They're sitting there watching you. I don't 
want anybody to sit there watching me.
- Yes, I know.
- I am that person.
- Guilty all around!
- I won't turn you in.
- I'm just people watching. It's interesting.
- Yes, I do love that.
- And I wonder about their lives and...
- Well, you're weird and I'm
gonna call the firemen on you.
- But you're right when you said the first
two-thirds of this, but there was there
was a very... you know, the last part of
the book had a very adventure novel
quality to it that was like, oh well, that
turned. That was sudden.
- Because it was very, very urban, urban, 
urban, urban and then like woods.
- Oh, there's a countryside.
- And it just got me to thinking about
this society, like the whole society lives in 
cities and urban communities and like
farmhouses because he kept talking about
this farmhouse and then it was just...
so it got me to think about where do they
do their mundane stuff, how do they get
groceries? Who cooks for them? Do
they have another robot that brings
them their food? I just... it got me to 
thinking about all these things.
I must have a lot of chores.
- Gathers the eggs...
- If I could just sit there and talk to my 
family, though, I wouldn't.
- Are you tired of adulting? Is that
what you're telling us?
- It is really hard!
- No, I mean just this world he creates...
and I'm not a real science fiction
fan, although I do kind of like this
new dystopian... I mean, that's not new but
the dystopian sort of trend, but yeah.
Hunger Games and all those things
you can sort of see
in here too, which I love. But yeah,
he creates a world that raises as
many questions I think as --
- I think he's brief on purpose.
- Yes.
- It seems like he, and like
you were saying
disjointed, I got the feeling of it being
this very ethereal kind of hazy world
and I think that might have been like
Guy waking up from his haze, right?
Everybody else is in this haze.
They're constantly talking to their
parlor family. If they do have social
time, it's with the parlor family and the...
so the language very much evokes
this kind of ethereal haziness and --
-- And it takes you... like a dream, it takes 
you a while to figure out what's going on.
- Exactly!
- It took me a long time to figure out
what was up with his wife.
- So I took that as like Guy's kind of waking
up to this world that exists where
people actually memorize books in order
to save them. So... I don't know.
- That's great. No, that is a really good point
because I did have that sort of sense
when I was reading it, that it was very...
hazy is a great word because he just
tells you enough to sort of create --
- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 --
-- an out of focus, yes, an out-of-focus
picture of this world and then it makes
you wonder. But that really speaks to
the whole theme of what books
can do, you know? It sort of creates this
reality and you have to fill in them. You have to use your brain to fill in the...
- You have to sit and think.
- Yeah. Sit and think. What a concept.
So if you have thoughts on Fahrenheit
451, please leave them in the comment
section. We're going to put some
read-alikes. I picked a teen book as the
best read-alike I've found for this one.
It's called Feed --
- Oh, I've read that one.
- By Anderson.
Have you read that?
- I have read that. That's a great pick.
- Yeah because --
- M.T. Anderson.
- M.T. Anderson. I've got it right
behind us. It's the story
about a boy who meets a girl and it's --
- Outer space, right?
- No, I think it's more like 15
minutes into the future.
- Oh yeah.
- Because everybody has computer
implants to access the web and this boy
meets a girl who grew up without those
implants and she has to use her... she has
an imagination. She thinks about things
and so it was a great updating,
I think, for this story.
- The thing that struck me about
that book too was this idea of something
planted in your brain that has
commercials on it.
- Yeah.
- Commercials for products. Ugh!
- And they can't sell to her and so that's
where she gets into trouble.
- My read-alike would be... it's not a
read-alike really, but one book that this 
reminded me of was The Book Thief.
- Oh see, I haven't read that one.
[collectively] Oh!
- Sorry, I had to wookiee
growl at that one.
- Yes, love that. The idea of saving something and --
- I think they talked about how it was sad 
and I didn't want to read a sad book.
That's why I didn't read that.
- It'll be OK.
- I'm gonna read a happy book!
- I like happy books, too.
- But I do think that there's a time and
a place for the books that move us,
that make us actually think about things.
- So getting ready to wind up here today.
- This was not enough time.
- Thanks, Suzanne --
- Oh, thank you guys.
Tobias from the Wichita Eagle. And join us 
next time, November 9th at 12:30.
We're going to be talking about Sisterland by Curtis Sitten-- I know. I LOVED Eligible.
Eligible was one of my favorite books.
- It's a happy book.
- Wait, is Sisterland the
one about the earthquake?
- Yeah.
- I think I read it.
- Sisters, twin sisters --
- I read that, too!
- Twin sister with psychic abilities and
it's cool. I think it's gonna be a great
talk on that one.
- Yeah, we're excited. If you need to check 
that book out, you can check it out here at
Central. We actually have some copies
available. Just tell me you need one
for the ICTBC or just ask for Sara
Racine or message us on Facebook and we
can even send it out to a branch if
that's easier for you. But I would like
to end before we actually turn off with
what book would you not only save, but
memorize? Like what book would you put
forth that extra effort to memorize?
- I... go ahead.
- I would memorize Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling. It has such a
wonderful lyrical feel. "The cat who
walked by his lonesome best
beloved this befell be happened
and became."
- Language.
- Language.
- Language is important.
- My book that I'd save is Bird by Bird by
Anne Lamott because I love, love, love that
book. But the one I'd memorize probably
is the one I remember from childhood as
the book that made me start reading,
which was the Phantom Tollbooth.
- I love that book!
- Word play.
- So good. Well, my book that I would
save and my book that I think I would
memorize, same because the reason that I
would save it was because of the
language and what it like made me
feel, had lots of feelings.
- All the feels.
- All the feels.
And it was Walt Whitman's Song of Myself 
and it just came to me at a time when I
really, really needed to
read those words and
I love it to this day.
- I think you should start
memorizing right now.
- I probably should.
- Because you never know what's going to happen.
-- the two lines that I wanted to remember 
because I'm really bad at memorization.
- So get started.
- I will do that. Look for it next time.
Nope, just kidding. We're gonna
talk about Sisterland.
- Then she will recite Song of Myself.
- All right, well, thank you everyone
for joining us. We'll continue this
conversation in the comments.
Racine, final words?
Thanks for being here. We'll
see you in November.
- Thanks. Keep reading.
- Bye.
