Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Summary

Zero to Well-Read – Book Riot Podcast Episode: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky Release Date: July 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Zero to Well-Read explores Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. Hosts Jeff and Rebecca go beyond the familiar “book banning” theme, delving into Bradbury’s layered critique of authoritarianism, media saturation, individual consciousness, and the tangled role of books in building a more thoughtful society. They examine the book’s historical context, Bradbury’s complicated views, its lasting relevance, style, and impact, while sharing personal reading experiences and memorable moments from the text.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Fahrenheit 451 Really About? [01:03–07:46]

• Rebecca summarizes: Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books in a hyper-mediated, numb, war-torn future, encounters people and events that awaken his curiosity and resistance.
  • “Books have been banned in this alternate future because they make people unhappy. It’s a source of disease. Wall-size TV screens dominate home living rooms... Drug use is rampant as citizens attempt to dissociate from daily life and numb themselves.” – Rebecca [03:45]
• The “book banning” message is only the tip of the iceberg—Bradbury’s concerns are wider: conformity, screen obsession, and voluntary surrender of thought.
• The iconic image of firemen burning books remains potent, but the deeper message is about why societies let their freedoms erode.

2. Dystopias in Context – The Big Three [11:27–13:54]

• Jeff posits Bradbury’s novel is one of three “let’s not go there” dystopias alongside 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale.
  • “If you have to rank within those three, I think it’s 1984, one; Fahrenheit two; Handmaid’s three. This is just my sense of it.” – Jeff [11:57]
• Rebecca argues the order of prominence toggles with political climate—Handmaid’s Tale surges in moments of reproductive rights debate, Fahrenheit 451 during censorship waves.
• These novels wield “aura”—their titles become shorthand in discourse, even as fewer people actually read them.

3. Publication, Genre, and Literary Networks [14:14–17:35]

• Bradbury was already a notable science fiction writer pre-Fahrenheit 451.
• The novel’s origins: “The Fireman,” a short story, later expanded at his editor’s urging.
• Mass market paperbacks—Fahrenheit 451’s reach was supercharged by distributing thousands of early copies.
• Historical backdrop: Written amid post-WWII anxieties, Stalinism, and the rise of McCarthyism—Bradbury interrogates “what kind of world will we build if things keep going this way?”

4. Chilling Prescience: Technology and Numbing Culture [17:35–24:47]

• Wall-sized screens, reality TV, headphones (the “seashells”): Bradbury predicted today’s media landscape vividly.
• Montag’s wife Millie’s numbed existence is particularly haunting—overdoses, endless screen time, escapist drugs.
  • “She’s deep. Millie refers to ... the characters on some of the shows as her family ... Some of the dramas are written to have open spots where you can, like, send away for the script and the characters on screen deliver their lines ... and you can participate.” – Rebecca [19:34]
• The line between immersive entertainment and self-imposed social prison is alarmingly thin.

5. Meta-Message: Books as Means, Not Ends [22:28–24:47]

• The core argument isn’t mere biblio-idealism: books matter because they foster critical consciousness, empathy, and vision, not because paper-and-ink is magical.
  • “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.” – Jeff [22:20]

6. Ironies, Bans, and Legacy [23:34–25:28]

• Fahrenheit 451 is itself perennially banned, a kind of “poetic injustice.”
  • “...being one of the most banned books of the last two centuries. And despite that, this book has never been out of print... one of the most popular works.” – Rebecca [24:17]

7. Bradbury Himself: Contradictions and Conservatism [26:23–34:41]

• Bradbury identified first as a sci-fi writer, but also “literary.”
• Politically, he leaned conservative, voted Republican, and worried about “special interests” and identity politics curtailing free expression.
• The show discusses the challenge of separating a work’s radical legacy from its author’s mixed politics and anxieties about government and free speech.

8. The Writing and the Reading Experience [38:17–41:08]

• Personal stories: For Rebecca, reading Fahrenheit 451 as a freshman was transformative—her “life-changing” entry to dystopian literature.
  • “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.” – Rebecca [38:44]
• Bradbury’s urgent, original style stands apart—unusual vocabulary, herky-jerky sentences energized by the momentum of the action.

9. How Resistance Works: Ideas, Empathy, Memory [43:48–55:35]

• The “book people,” memorizing texts to hold on to knowledge, spark hope.
• Faber’s threefold theory of why books matter [49:24]:
  1. Quality and texture of information
  2. Leisure to digest it
  3. Right to act on what you learn
• The ending offers hope: the book people will rebuild, carrying the seeds of culture within themselves after catastrophe.

10. Voluntary Oppression: Screens, Distraction, and Comfort [45:51–47:16]

• The novel critiques not only government imposition, but citizens’ willingness to plug in and tune out.
  • “The mythology here is that people just willingly stopped reading because it was hard ... and then the government realized that they could benefit from people not engaging with ideas.” – Rebecca [47:16]
• Unlike Orwell’s 1984, oppression here is bottom-up, not top-down.

11. Technology as Tool—not Destiny [58:39–60:56]

• Books are one vessel for transmitting ideas and empathy; technologies themselves are neither good nor bad.
  • “There’s no technology good or bad, but that the use of it makes it so.” – Jeff [58:58]
• Physical books’ “hackability”—they can be owned, hidden, physically shared—remains a meaningful difference from digital media.

12. Critical Consciousness: Awakenings and Agency [61:36–67:48]

• Montag’s path: awakening through exposure to art (Faber), empathy (the woman who burns with her books), and modeling (Clarisse’s family life).
• Social change grows when individuals stop numbing themselves and start connecting, imagining, questioning.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Top Quotes (with Context & Timestamps)

• “It was a pleasure to burn.” – Opening line, cited as “on the Mount Rushmore of opening lines” [69:51]
• “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?” – [56:56], Jeff on the necessity of discomfort for real engagement
• “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.” – [77:29], Jeff, quoting the novel’s reckoning with the cost of resistance
• “Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you dropped dead in ten 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.” – [76:12], one of the “tattoo-worthy” lines chosen by Rebecca
• “If there’s an argument to this book, the first argument is not we should make books available to everyone... the top line argument is that your best weapon against these kinds of tools of oppression is imagination and empathy.” – Rebecca [66:02]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Plot, Setting, and Key Characters: 03:45–07:46
• Place in Dystopian Canon: 11:27–13:54
• Publication & Genre History: 14:14–17:35
• Tech Prophecy, Numbing Culture: 17:35–22:28
• Bradbury’s Politics & "Book Bans": 23:34–34:41
• Rebecca’s Personal Reading Experience: 38:17–41:08
• Role and Texture of Books: 49:24–54:23
• Critical Consciousness — Montag’s Awakening: 61:36–67:48
• Notable Quotes Discussion: 75:35–79:31
• Further Reading/Read-alikes: 89:00–92:26
• Final Scoring and Takeaways: 94:07–96:39

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Further Reading & Connections

Direct Literary Kin:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Other Related Works:

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
• Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (in its vision of familial resistance)

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Stray & Miscellaneous Observations

• Bradbury’s lore: He wrote the first draft in a UCLA library, feeding coins into pay-typewriters.
• Character names: Montag (paper company), Faber (pencil brand)—unconscious inspiration.
• Bradbury regretted “killing off” Clarisse, and she survives in the 1966 film adaptation.
• The 2018 adaptation with Michael B. Jordan “bricked,” leaving space for a new, definitive adaptation (hosts nominate Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan to direct).

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Final Takeaways & Zero to Well-Read Score

• Intellectual freedom and critical consciousness are the core values—books are a means, not the end.
• Relevance: Fahrenheit 451 remains urgently resonant in an era of digital distraction, voluntary numbing, and ongoing censorship.
• Zero to Well-Read Composite Score:
  • Historical Importance: 9
  • Readability: 9
  • Contemporary Relevance: 10
  • Book Nerd “Read Cred”: 6-7
  • “Damn” Factor: 9

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Summary in One Sentence

A gripping, disturbingly prescient meditation on the dangers of both authoritarian censorship and cultural self-numbing, Fahrenheit 451 demands vigilance not just for books but for the critical, empathic consciousness they can awaken.

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Recommended For:
Anyone who cares about books, freedom, or the slippery ways societies surrender thought for comfort—and for those who mistake “books are good!” for the deeper, tougher work Bradbury asks.

Not for:
Readers seeking escapism alone—this one pulls you out of your comfort zone and holds up an unsettling mirror to our times.

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[Listen, recommend, and share your reading stories at Zero to Well-Read!]

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com Today's book is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, over 70 years old at this point. But you want the 60th anniversary edition and you can find it on ThriftBooks.com new about $20 used. You can get as low as $14. And here's the reason you want this. It has a wonderful array of supplementary materials, letters, annotations, illustrations, other source material, later reflections, a really cool reading experience. And because Fahrenheit 451 is only about, you know, 150 pages long, it's not sort of tacking on to a long reading experience. I find myself eager, not just because recording the show, to jump in and see and read more about the backstory. So go to thriftbooks.com, look for the 60th anniversary edition. You can find it there. Time for the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I am Jeff o' Neill and I'm Rebecca Schinsky. This week we're talking about Ray Bradbury's eerily prescient dystopian novel about book banning, screen addiction, and the siren song of thinking for yourself when you live in an authoritarian state. Fahrenheit 451. It's a big day here, Jeff.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Big day. This. I know this book is important to you. I'm doing a little bit of Rebecca clear out time for you, especially here. You've gotten into your bag in multiple ways about this Bradbury book. It's also one too, where I think there's probably a pretty big delta between the people who think they know what Fahrenheit 451 is all about and people who've actually read the book and then people who maybe spend a beat longer than it's actually about because like on one hand the metaphor is sort of obvious, Right. But once you get beyond the fire men who burn books and books are bad. There's quite a bit more here. And as you have here down in the notes, we'll get into Bradbury's not quite the guy you think he is. And that's not bad necessarily. But it is more complicated than books are good. Don't burn them.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes. If you have not touched this since high school, there's a lot in the book that there's just a lot more to it. And the top line message that we all remember from our high school readings of it is powerful and is the main thing but there's so much going on here. Before we jump in though, just want to remind everybody. You can please click the link in the show notes to become a member at our Patreon that gives you access to our guided read alongs. We just wrapped up one recently for the Odyssey. We have another one planned for the fall that we'll be announcing soon. Also gives you our office hours bonus content. We'll be talking about some of the characters and going a little bit more in depth on Fahrenheit 451. You can get that at patreon.com 0to

[Jeff O'Neill]

well ready and reminder whenever you can rate and review the show five stars. You can leave a review but super interesting. You know if you've emailed us, thank you so much and you can always email us@02 well read bookriot.com you've just heard relatively recently a mailbag episode and you can hear the kinds of things we take all comers. We're interested in all kinds of questions and feedback for read alikes to why did you take this particular angle? Or what do you think of this? Or how bad is your back and how does it relate to your reading life? Weirdly relevant as you get a little bit older. The meat sack that we all sort of walk around in at the same time. Guy Montag, the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, probably in the top tier of character names people remember. It's kind of amazing how often people don't remember specific character names, but he is one of them. And so Rebecca, what does Guy Montag get up to in the course of Fahrenheit 451?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, as you teased in the intro, he's a fireman. But in the world that he lives in, firemen don't put out fires. Fires, they start them. In this alternate future, it is sometime after 2022. Like the only real year that's mentioned in the book is that these wars have been going on since 2022. There's speculation that the book is set around 2052, but just think future. And this was super future in 1951 when the story first came out. Books have been banned in this alternate future because they make people unhappy. It's a source of disease. Wall sized TV screens dominate home living rooms. They play meaningless dramas and really melodramatic reality shows. And when they're not watching screens, people in this world are listening to entertainment on small wireless devices that fit into their ears. Yeah, sound familiar? Drug use is rampant as citizens are attempting to dissociate from daily life and numb themselves to this never ending cycle of war that they're in. And Montag is a fireman. His job, as I said, is not to put out fires, but he starts them in the home where people are reported to be hiding books. So the book begins. Montag is on his way home from work after a shift during which a woman went down in flames with her books. Rather than leave her house, he's heading home when he happens to bump into this young woman named Clarice. And she starts talking to him about a past in which people weren't so afraid. She doesn't know at the time that he is hiding a few books of his own, including one that he has brought home with him on that day.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And we don't know that either at that time. Right. Like that's. That's something we don't know for quite some time, which is important.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, there's just. Clarice is just odd. And she just starts talking to him. And he can tell there's something different about her. And he's really drawn to it. She's free in some ways, she's really intriguing. And he starts to think that like maybe this has come from her reading books. She mentions that her family spends the evenings not watching the room sized TV screens, but sitting around talking with each other and with their guests. So Montag goes home, he's shaken up by the woman's death that he witnessed and by his encounter with Clarice. He continue, continues to bump into her for a little while. Like they have several encounters that really start to become entrancing for him. And this moves him to start reading the books that he's been hiding away. And eventually to reach out to a like minded soul, A former professor named Faber, in hopes of forming some kind of resistance with each other. Then one day, the firemen head out on a call and Montag realizes that the house they're pulling up to is his own. And the story from there is just on rails over the next 24 or so hours. As Montag flees the city, Bombs are dropping from the latest war. And of course, as the title tells us, 451 degrees is the temperature at which book paper burns. So then we're off.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, we were talking about, in a recent episode about the great pursuers. And there's one of the great chase scenes in literature is really the back, what third of this book? Something like that. The last 50 or 60 pages. A couple of things that Rebecca didn't say here, but because they're not really part of the plot. It's short 150 pages. Maybe it takes a little like you get the scene and you get a lot of the. The world setting of Montag in his own marital relationship and the fraughtness there. But then a couple things happen pretty quickly and it really reads pretty amazingly. At the same time, you have here the title Fahrenheit 451 is a temperature. What a book Paper will burn or spontaneously combust. He didn't know this early titles was the Fireman. And then it was like Fahrenheit 205, 206. He was trying to figure out what point do paper burns. He was like calling professors, but in a great twist of what most people understand to be irony, but it is not. He finally got the answer from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Who would know about what point people burns? So fire people were actually involved in the titling about. Probably the single greatest representation of firemen in literature. I can't think of another one, even though it's a.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You can't think of another representation at all of a firefighter in the show?

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, I can't really. I can't really either. I think in. The only other one I can think of in something that's close to my heart, that's vaguely, literally connected, is Roxanne, which is a Steve Martin movie based on Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the person to whom Steve Martin is puppeteering, I believe is a fire person. That was the only one I could come up with. And then there's Backdraft and some other things. But in books it's an unusual. It's unusual. We don't get a lot of these.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

So why it's important? I mean probably you already it's important for that thing you felt listener when you saw this pop up in the feed like you know what this book is like, it's become a signal. I do think the title does a lot of work. If this was called the Fireman, it's an unbelievable title. And even Initially he had 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but he inverted it. And I don't know how to explain it, but Fahrenheit 451 is better than 451 Fahrenheit. I don't know why that is awesome. It just is. It's just awesome. And I think this. Talk to me about this, if this is right to you, Rebecca. Dystopian. Let's not go there fiction. Let's call it not this, not. Let's not go there fiction, cautionary tale fiction. It's 1984. It's Fahrenheit 451 and it's the Handmaid's Tale. Like, if you do, like, those are the top three, that's the trifecta. That's the trifecta. And you can go, there's others, like we talked about parable in the Solar of the Sower and there's Brave New World and the Time Machine. Like, you can go in a bunch of different places. But I think if you're picking three, I think it's those three. And I think if you have to rank within those three. This is just my sense of it, right? So I'm trying to see how and listener, you know, imagine in your own mind how different it is. I think it's 1984. One Fahrenheit, two handmades, three. Is that. Is that your sense of it, too, Rebecca?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's a really good question. I think 1984 is the perennial number one there. And my reading on it is it toggles between Fahrenheit and Handmaid's Tale. They take turns in that 2, 3 position, depending on what's going on globally and politically. You know, when we're talking about, like, the Supreme Court overturning Roe versus Wade, the Handmaid's Tale is going to pop back up. And Ellen, people dress up.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, that's one thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

People dress up as bad people.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Don't. They don't dress up as firemen when books get banned, because that would be.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But they do point to Fahrenheit 451. And I think much in the same way that these books come up again when issues are happening, when current issues are happening politically, people use these titles as shorts. Like, oh, like it's some Fahrenheit 451 shit. This is some 1984 shit. This is just like in the Handmaid's Tale and that those ideas, the like the aura of these books exceeds the like, the deeper cultural knowledge of them. But the awareness that these titles exist and that they stand for some kind of. Let's not go there. Speculative fiction is really widespread at the

[Jeff O'Neill]

time of this writing. So it was Originally published in 1951 as a short story in the Firemen. You have a note here about the sci fi magazines of yesteryear. I was reading a little about the publication history and how his agent was shopping this around the galaxy of choices for Bradbury and his agent at this point was pretty remarkable and hard to. Hard to imagine how it would work. Now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The like 40s and 50s especially were a really golden age of genre fiction magazines, but especially science fiction and fantasy. So Bradbury at the time that this comes out was already known as the best working science fiction writer. Multiple books, multiple reviewers refer to him that way in the reviews of Fahrenheit 451. But yeah, as you've said, this comes out as a short story called the Fireman in Galaxy Science fiction magazine in 1951. That's just one of dozens of sci fi magazines and these magazines were open for submissions. It's the way that a lot of mid century genre writers got their starts was either joining a local writers group where they make friends and they start to get some connections, which Bradbury does as well, or you're just toiling away in your room writing a story and you send it in and cross your fingers and then find out you're going to be in one of these magazines. Literary agents and publishers were scouting them. Or you could, you know, pitch your whole novel by sending in here's the story that I had published in Galaxy. It was like the best way to think about it for I think folks who grew up in the media ecosystem that we're in now is think about how like every substack seems to refer to a whole bunch of other substacks. Or like that's right, if all the podcasters seem to know each other. It was that way among those early genres. Magazines like they, they really formed networks of writers that enabled them to not just connect with each other, but to get new opportunities and then to get visibility that would take them up to the book level. And it's Bradbury's book editor at Ballantein who is like, you know, actually this is good on its own. Let's expand it. So Bradbury then spent two years expanding the short story into this 150 page novel, Novella. I don't know like what the cutoff is on page count.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think 200 pages. Anything longer than 200 I'm willing to call a novel grudgingly. Anything shorter is certainly a novella to me, but that's kind of how I think about it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But yeah, so it's a novella in 1953 that they publish in a collection with two other short stories. And then within a few years Fahrenheit 451 had taken off so much that they just started publishing it as its own standalone. But it also also lands at this really interesting moment in publishing history where mass market paperbacks were brand new and Balantein was on the cutting edge of that. So they sent like a couple hundred early hardcover copies to reviewers, but they also sent hundreds of mass market paperbacks out to other media.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I saw 6,000 as the number. Did you see that? Like, which is an unbelievable number. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that starts to build. Like all those people have early access to Fahrenheit 451 and that starts to build the reputation and the excitement around this story. But like they knew that they had something really special here. And it lands at a really important time. Like this is written in the post World War II moment. Bradbury is reflecting on Stalin's achievements with tamping down original thought and creative expression. And he's also watching McCarthyism rise in the US so there's just this real close collision of geopolitical forces that he's just in the stew of what kind of world. If we keep going the way we're going now, what kind of world are we going to be in in a hundred years?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I think for people that haven't read it before, I think the thing they may find as much surprising as the. Probably the most surprising is the shock of recognition about the shift to visual media. Like there's these. Essentially these people are starting to build their own prisons of media. Like the. Basically TV screens the size of walls. Rebecca, is that your understanding? And the Montag household has had. They have three of them, like sort of a three sided room. And the question is they're trying to like save up for. To finally enclose, like get that fourth wall. So you're really immersed and there does seem to be. I don't know if Bradbury intended this. There seems to be a sense that if you do that, that is sort of it. Like you have put yourself in a media jail and. And you're never really gonna get out of it at the same time. And the kinds of things that are put on there seem random and terrifying. If you've ever seen the Gene Wilder, Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And they go through that tunnel and it's like a series of like, arresting and strange images. And some of them are more or less, there are plots. And she calls them the players and they're my family. And it becomes extremely disturbing how much the media box and their exposure to media, both explicitly and implicitly, is part of their oppression that they're sort of opting into in their own home.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, and it's not just the exposure to media, but the, like, constant immersion in it. When Montag gets home from work on that first night of the story, his wife Millie is laying on their bed and she's unconscious. She's got her, they call them seashells, but she's got her earbuds in and she's overdosed on something because she's miserable. And he calls the paramedics. They come, they have a special machine that like pumps your stomach and swaps your blood out. And they're like, yeah, we, we get 10 of these every day.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's only 50 bucks. That's, that's so, so cheap because it's commoditized. They do it so often. It's like having your toilet plunged.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right. And so this is how miserable people are in this future where they believe that they are happy, but by separating themselves from reality, they've made themselves happy, but really they've made themselves miserable. That she's overdosing. This happens 10 times a night for these local paramedics. But she's like, she's deep. Millie refers to, as you said, the characters on some of the shows as her family. Some of the dramas are written to have open spots where you can, like, send away for the script and the characters on screen, deliver their lines in the moment and then they pause and they look out at you in your living room and you can participate. Bradbury got this idea from radio dramas, but, like, this does not seem that far off from where we are with short form video.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Are we sure that's not a good idea? Like, literally a good idea for some of these participatory, like, super fandoms where, like, there's a. It made me think the closest parallel I could think of. And again, it's not nearly as inimical as this is the sing along versions of show of, like movies where there's like the bouncing ball. We're supposed to sing along. And one of the reasons these kinds of works can be so unnerving is that you can see a tendril of connection to something in your own life. And it makes you wonder is it or is it not a road to the Am I on the road there or not? Is this a good or bad thing? And I think one of the reasons that these dystopian sci fi speculative which really jolt us out of the specificity of the moment is that it gives us some perspective. We can compare how current modern life is or is not like that. Whereas just we get lost in kind of. I find a kind of attention blindness to Screens are bad. Screens are bad, screens are bad. Like you kind of get used to it, right? But then if you get shocked out of it it and you really get taken out of your time and place, then it gives you some perspective in a moment to reconsider differently. And that I think is also something Bradbury's interested in. The function of a book. You 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 kerfluffle or the culture war of the day is, right. They have. 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. Something this book is about is like how do you jar yourself out of complacency? 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 15050 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. Like, 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. It's similar to, like, the Parable of the sower starts in 20, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. But 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And just one note, it's like so many people, there's obvious parallels to 1984. Right. And Brad Raven said, like, I can totally see it. But actually it was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which is really about Stalin. So what's interesting is Orwell comes to this sci fi dystopian speculative fiction from 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 maybe this is a social realist novel, Arthur Koestler'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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. And he asks Bradbury in the last interview that, 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 like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And at the publication. Bradbury was 31 years old. He was born in Illinois in 1920. Then he moved to Arizona when he was 6. 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? Usually It's a signal 31 years old that puts them 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 Clay Le 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. This is a little. 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 like the idea of just getting something. And 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 Schinsky]

Rebecca. They do. And this is one of the great literary origin stories that I've ever read. So Bradbury make it up?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like if this weren't true and he made it up, I would also believe that, that he made it up.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 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. 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 hour an 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. Just an incredible, 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 like 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 because he's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I mean we've talked about this on the Book Riot podcast and together about 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. And we read his, 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 say 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. And this is something that's I think good for all of us to remember when we, 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 things. And in 50 years I'm sure there's things I think right now that are going to shown to be ridiculous and other ideas giving Some space for those ideas, even if I don't agree with them again, within, you know, the laws that we have and safety and other things. Because he is very concerned with special interests is how we think about it now. And there's a. And there's a section of 450 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 like, that is fascinating. I think the thing that he doesn't understand or doesn't think about the 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? Because 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Like he saw the threat of censorship as most likely to come from really what we would talk about as identity politics today. 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. Like really interesting to wonder what would what Bradbury, what kind of statements he would have been making post 2016.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm not sure he'd be a fan, Rebecca. I'm just gonna put that out there of 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 angels. Neither 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 riding 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 ideolog and like party affiliations don't necessarily neat mapley over time, 50, 60, 75 years later. So to say he's a Republican, was a Republican would be now, I don't know. You 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 just we talked about before, her own politics are not something that maybe we would, you know, 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. I'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 of conversation I want to be a part of in this way?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. That. 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 Valentine, you know, revert back to the original print and that there be no other versions. So, 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 this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I wondered the same thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's a wild thing to do. At the same time, our first exposure. I'll go, this is more you than me. The. 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 as a teenager when I was in my, like, real hardcore sci fi age. Like 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 diet. Not 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 4 50.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 was 13.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Say more about that. What was it? What was it? What was the feeling about that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's so cool. That's a whiplash. Okay, I hear you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, 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 gonna get fired for teaching Romeo and Juliet because it included underage sex. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's a great hook. It's a great hook by itself.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And Bradbury's 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 trope ification in Fahrenheit 451. And the writing is really, really good. He has, like, a broad and interesting vocabulary, a really deep bench of literary references. I didn't get a lot of.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, he writes unusual sentences. Like, he writes, like. 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. Like, he's a good writer in a way that's. It feels different than other kinds of good writers, you know, like, you'll know you can. Like, a New Yorker kind of a writer. Like, that's wonderful. I love the New Yorker, but it kind of has a house style. Like, there's a certain competence of sheen to it. And, like. But even certain paragraphs be kind of herky jerky sometimes. Or unless, like, descriptors that are a little bit odd. Like, I think you can tell. I don't know. This is. I'm just projecting here that he doesn't have a classical education. Like, 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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

what I'm trying to say. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Many tattoos.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Only literary tattoos.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're not going to make you say what it is. You can keep that. You can put a veil over that for now. 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. When you realize that he has been transgressing the whole time we've known Guy Montag, like, 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 he suggests he's on his way to some kind of resistance, even though he doesn't know that is the case.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, like, their air ducts? That never would occur to me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Where would I put my contraband? Is a good question.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Probably not an air vent. I don't know.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. Okay. I'm just. I'm just thinking out loud here. It's like, this is a thing that now you put it. You put it in the ceiling. Whereas 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Anyway, yeah, these are five feet tall, so putting things in the ceiling is just impractical.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's like putting it on top of Mount Everest. Like, this might as well not exist.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But, yeah, there is this. To get back to the book, like, 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. Wake something 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. It's us getting to see Montag wake up. And it's just fascinating in this moment. Like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's right. That's right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, 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 system 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, than the. 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. And 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 that'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. Technologyal 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 and 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 intellectual or sensory or psychological palliative euthanasia. I just wanted 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. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. There's the weird logic of the book is, you know, like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Millie's plight is the most chilling part for me. Right. Because it seems. Seems different. It seems plausible with the details changed a little bit to see. And I think we do. You know, when 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 something for its avoidance. It's some sort of disassociation, radiation. And in each individual second of it, you don't notice the accrual. It's like climate change almost like over long periods of time. And 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. People not engaging with ideas and not engaging with.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 a book kind of annoying. And it's 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. But then firemen didn't have a job to do. And so sort of the standing army. We talked about the US Constitution episode of the Mand 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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

[Jeff O'Neill]

in reports we can plant some drugs on them.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, but just that, like, I. It's so interesting that you referred 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. And like, look, here we still are in 2026, but you can see it

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 could be 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. I think, 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 with this sort of thread? Three part theory of what we need from books is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. That we need quality and texture of information. We need leisure to digest it. 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. 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, 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 Montgomery, like, really the structures that they are living inside. 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 are who we understand at the end are going to restart society. They turn around and they walk into the city, and they're like, we're going to be needed.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 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. 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. It 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's not don't read for fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, people listening to the show is to find books that have a quality or texture that is generative, that's fertile, that's transformative. I think, I don't think that's unfair to say there. Yeah, that's 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. The Microsoft BE one 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 it's. 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 it human interiority? And the Central Terror of 1984 is Big Brother King 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 and you become a dormant sort of seed. Right. Like 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, you know, that only drop their seeds during a forest fire.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 the 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 onto art as a mechanism for connection and survival and have committed it to memory and are going around to share it 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 kind of. 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. And I just love and appreciate that Brad 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You do not. You don't want to pick up your phone while you're reading for 51. It makes you feel terrible to be.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I thought about that. I did think about that when I. I was. I. Michelle and I housed all eight episodes of the Bear in one afternoon. And I read Fahrenheit 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 there with some.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 a. Like, we do have this way to just separate ourselves from our physical reality 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. Like. Like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. It'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. 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 is like, yeah, this is tough. Tough. That's tough. But that maybe is part of it at the same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. I was thinking about it. 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 worlds. And I do it sometimes, and it's easy and it's completely 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. And, like, 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. Like, don't hear me shaming you about that. Just. 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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And there's an inversion, too, that you can think about where books are just a technology. Right, Right. Like, there are vessels for something. We'll talk about that a little bit more a bit later. But one reason. No, that. One reason. Know that the impetus to creativity and art and Storytelling is not a product of the book is because it existed before there were books around like that's we talked about with the Odyssey. Like it, it found a technology that would let it be disseminated and captured and like transported in a different way. But the book is not a necessary condition of having an idea of having an artistic experience of living an engaged and critical life. And that also shows 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 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. But there's no technology good or there's nothing good or bad that thinking makes it so. Is that Shakespeare? I think that Shakespeare, I can't remember where that comes from. And I would also say there's no technology of 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 own, you have sort of a license to it through the platform. Platform. So if Audible or Kindle or Apple Ebooks or Bookshop goes away tomorrow, they 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, the book that is as vessels for certain kind of ideas and maybe there's other kinds of deals. It's not, it lends itself. 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 and 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Like, you have a note here, and I want to hear you talk about the sparking of critical consciousness, because 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 original around me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So, I mean, we. In the reading of the book, you realize relatively late in the book, it is not a lit. His journey to critical consciousness. Not linear, going from 0 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 she lights the match. But 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 Montag with on his critical consciousness is he meets this young woman who's like 17ish. 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. Ray 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 had. 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 so you could have had headphones in in 1946. They didn't really exist. You 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. 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. With Faber, he sees something that triggered his, like a human response and 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. So 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 and talking 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So the move to a critical consciousness or a move to thinking, to being different in the world than you are. Bradbury sort of hypothesized 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 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. Like, I don't. There's someone living a life that's not like mine, that's not like anyone else I knows. And she seems not just okay, but happy. And 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then he's just off and it's. Man, it's such a. It is just such a compelling read. All the way down.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 like, pleasant and interesting.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If there's an argument to this book, the first argument is not we should make books available to everyone.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Books are important.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's part of it. But the top line argument is that you're 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. Those ideas. 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 all the things that we see on the page in this book, but that we see in our reality today too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. It's transportable consciousness is the best we have. Like Fran Lebowitz has said, like, 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 and you're 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 in the. 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 they're difficult. They are quite difficult.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And Bradbury's own deep and eclectic reading habits are really on display in the.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Showing off a little bit. I don't know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't know. In Fahrenheit 451 doesn't mention a lot of ladies, but he does. 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, like, he's reading that stuff. There's a quote from an Alexander Smith essay. There are references to Gulliver's Travels. There's reference to the life of Johnson by James Boswell, to Plato's Republic. 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 just. 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. 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, like, thought to Google afterwards.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I thought it was interesting that a lot of it was poetry. That's. Poetry 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. Like a lot of us don't.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Poetry.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

I just.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I took that. I took that as a notable sort of moment of look at the atomic units that are retained even outside of the books. They 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 occurred to you that maybe is outside the main of our argumented discussion and investigation of the ideas of the book itself.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The opening line of this book, it was a pleasure to burn, is on the Mount Rushmore of opening lines and. And among the most misused quotations.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I agree with you on both counts.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

What do.

[Jeff O'Neill]

When it's misused? What do people think it means?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I've seen it misused in places of like. Like burning eroticism. Like it was a pleasure to burn

[Jeff O'Neill]

or to burn with a gem like flame. Like, I think that's Walter Pater talking about, like burning as a way of being in the world. Right? Like burning.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Like, we find out that he hates it, that he is unhappy. But it was a pleasure to burn is like just an Alzheimer 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Call me Ishmael. Is 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. They're the ones who are addicted to school. 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 spin off 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. So we've really moved in how these technologies work and who seems susceptible to them. And Bradbury's writing from, of course, the moment that he was living in. But I think if it were written today, like, we're not. It's not the housewives that are the problem in 2026.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I had a straight thought of, is this the best novel with a number in its title?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Are we not counting 1984 as a

[Jeff O'Neill]

novel I assume we take in 1984. But I was actually thinking of that more as a year. But like that's different a little bit. But like the other contenders for me, the other that are on the. If I'm doing the top three, I think catch 22 and the three musketeers. Shoot me an email. Zero to well read bookrat.com if there's something I missed. But that was just sort of off the dome of like just have a number. It's a good one of their own. I think a lot of people do confuse catch 22 and Fahrenheit 451 by the way. Not read either.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A really funny confusion.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Very funny confusion.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You've never thought about it till right now. But 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 gonna go home and watch my stories.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

My stories.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And there was something about that phrase that always bothered. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And we're parasocial a little too much.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. We 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 here. We don't see in Parable of Sowers. And that got me thinking of the Hunger Games. And one thing Suzanne Collins does that. 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. But we see them interacting. We see their stuff style. We see their perversions. Like, kind of up close and personal. I don't think we get anyone in this book. Fahrenheit 451, Rebecca that is like, ah, yes, here is this person, the center of the Imperium. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. We get to see Elon Musk on his yacht at the same time that people are starving. We see it in reality, and it can be helpful in fiction to see that, too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, I'll just say Goodreads really whiffs on the most popular one here.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Goodreads have been doing fine, and he's

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I would argue this might be the worst moment in Fahrenheit 451. It's just on the nose. You don't even say it.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The you get one tattoo quote is stuff your eyes with wonder. He said, live as if you dropped 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I clocked this one as well. If you drop that 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 is you do what you do and you're gonna die in 10 seconds, it doesn't always go great. So I might. I might read against the Green. But that yes, there. 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. The. The amount of effort it takes for the regime to keep power.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Is unsustainable. So it's also true on the other side of the equation, like to have this amount of control. 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. Like it's not going to work the way you think it's going to Eventually.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 burn burning house. There must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 sort of deliberators I can be a part of. Movements toward the good. The good. The beautiful and the true and the just. If I just carry my little verse with me. Right? This is the. Mr. Keating. That the powerful play goes on and we shall contribute. That's. 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, population. Film and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm. This is again 1950. When he starts writing this. 1951. Like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Mm. Rebecca, anything else you want to hit there before we get to for you? If it's not for you?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No. Gosh, there's just so many good lines in this one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 burning is just stage one of a multi stage rocket trying to blast us into a different understanding of the world.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. 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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't have a good one. Let's see the mortal questions that are asked. Which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know? Sorry, I'm laughing. Each one is like, more relevant to 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Everything else is like, wow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Happy 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Yeah. I think the one that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think the. What is the good life? Plus what else might there be Is an interesting to yoke those together which is the image of the good life we don't really get. It's sort of inferred in the home of Clarice being amongst the book people that 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 is 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. This whole thing. This ain't it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This isn't working. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Rebecca, I'm not sure this is about art and writing. To make a case. It's. I'm gonna. It's gonna be tough for you. But give it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Give it a discussion in our agenda for. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing is just. Lol.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Absolutely.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Could you get the most of the gist from watching the A Signal adaptation?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. 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. And it bricked. So we are actually.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Did you watch that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I never watched it either. I don't know if it's good or underrated or what. But it did nothing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't know why I could not find a respected reviewer who thought it was decent. So.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. So there's space for signal adaptation. Rebecca. Movie, musical, TV series or Muppets.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 a hundred minutes and call it a day. Ridley Scott, Lord and Miller the guy who created Black Mirror, his name is Charlie brooker. Like surely a 24 has somebody in their stable for this. What do you think?

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 to make, he is very interested in like infrastructure, like buildings and ships and technology and a chase. And I think. And there's a. He brings a certain visual style that I think the idea of like the fire against these dystopian backdrops, I think he could handle, I mean, quite well at the same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm not gonna fight with you about a Christopher Nolan pick. I would be a billion percent on board. And especially everything here is practical effects. Like you just need a guy in a cool suit and a flamethrower.

[Jeff O'Neill]

He build a hound? He built a 60 foot cyclops. He could build a hound.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that would be great. But this is. Let's get Hollywood on this. It's time for a real moment for Fahrenheit 451.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. Rebecca, what did you find? What nuts did you find in your exploration?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, I told the story about typing it out on the UCLA library already. 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 like 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? 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's a good one.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I thought so.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. But you know, a room of one's own doesn't just apply. Apply to. You know, there's a reason a rogue one's won by Virginia Woolf is real. Like that's real for a 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 Radberry. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. The truffle. What do you make of that adaptation

[Jeff O'Neill]

as a reader, as an experience of this? Because it. It's already hopeful. Like yeah, 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. That dies here. She's not the only subject of this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm not sure I can take it or leave it. I think like if she had shown up with the book people that would have been cool. But because we're already on a hopefully 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. For what she's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's kind of where I came down on it too is that there's. There's other modes of enforcement that aren't just books. Like they're looking for other slippages, other. 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. Like you could do whatever you're gonna do.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Ballantine flew to LA and stayed with him for more than a week to like get him to finish the dance thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Got on a plane.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The other one had a regard in terms of how the sausage made can inform her understanding and enjoyment of the sausages. The original version of Fahrenheit 451 had a couple of short stories packaged with it together. Because he was under. Bradley was already under contract for another publisher for his next quote unquote novel. So that to make this a collection of short stories was kind of like Prince renaming himself the chemical sign for boron or whatever. I don't even know 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 well spring 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 Beatty 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Ogawa 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean I. I think it. 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 Again, I've said before, my favorite, the initial version is book nine and the Iliad where Achilles is like, wait a minute, this. This system is screwed up. I don't want to participate 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. It's not a trope. It's a repeated thing. You see in war stories, like especially Vietnam stories stories, or like Tim o' Brien often or Carl Moralantes or all quite. On the Western Front, you get these seeds of like, boy, this. 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. So what other zero to well read titles does it connect to, Rebecca?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 and we even wait them out.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I had Little Women for kind of an. A specific reason, but I was trying to imagine Clarice's household that I 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. And they weren't like other families. Like, they're not like other girls, I guess they 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. Like how can you create a pocket or a bubble or a safety zone or a. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I saw this in the notes and I was like, where is he?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I saved that. I Was like, I wonder if she's. Does that make sense or am I really off the. No, I think it does.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's like a. It's a. It's not an obvious reach, but it makes sense.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, he 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'll run back my take from 1984. Intellectual freedom is the root of all other freedoms. 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. People susceptible to all of the other dangerous and dangerous things and attempts at control.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 bands or book burning, but like you say, it's only a system. But the thing we want to protect, protect. And if it is in the form of books, wonderful. But if it is in the form of something else, there 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 like it's a version of what you're saying. Intellectual freedom. Do not mistake the technology for what we want the technology to do.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, and I think Bradbury would agree with that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, I think it's all. I think he says it explicitly several times.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Because. 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 1 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No I think it's. I think this one's hard to nail down. Like, it's not a technical 10, but it continues to be important. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, you know what that argues for being a 10, actually, now that you say. You throw that back at me because did we give an 84 a 10?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't remember, but I'm down to give Fahrenheit 451 a 10. It's been, well, the only historically important to me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 the, like. It doesn't have 2000 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. It's one of them. Maybe a nine. Nine and a half. Just because if we get down with that 500 BCE, I do think there's only a few tens in historical porn, but I'll give this a nine for sure.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Readability. Nine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a nine.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah. That's high.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Long snout, yeah. Current relevance of central questions. I'm happy with the 10 here. Thrilled with 11. Giraffe. I don't know what to say.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

75. 42.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. 42.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Book nerd. Read cred. Rebecca, talk to me about this one, because I. I don't know. I'm. It is so well known.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But is it hiding? I feel like it's hiding in plain sight.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A little well known.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Maybe six, seven.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Six, seven.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Six, seven.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Six, seven. Oh, damn factor.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I have never yet read this book and not put it down. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That struck me again this time, too. I think when I read at 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 earlier. I think what's left in the ashes is something I care about more of an as an older person than I did. At the same time, I'm, I'm happy with a 9 now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's give it a 9.

[Jeff O'Neill]

High scores for Fahrenheit 451, I think maybe surprise. 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. Surprised by the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You said it's been like 30 years for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that's three years, I think 4, 14 or 15 when I read that. And I was a much different person, much different reader and much different reading experiences. And I do think there the feature and the bug of the power, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So anyway, all right, thank you very much, Rebecca. You can go to patreon.com jilltowellred for guided read alongs, bonus content and membership options. For this episode we're going to be looking at character specific. Specifically I have my I want to talk about Captain Beatty in some detail at the time with you if you're interested. But also get into Millie and Clarice and some of the other 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 02 well Read podcast shoot us an email zero to well read dot com I am finding myself especially interested in your own stories listeners of encountering these books. I 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 work which is cool like 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 anecdoted 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 I'm more amenable to I want to hear people's stories about the relationship with books and ideas. Thank you so much to Thriftbooks 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 a new for me, but there's just a lot of interesting supporting materials at the end that I worth. I think it's worth having. And then finally, 00 to well read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast network. We did it. We got one of your canonical books under our belts.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

One of my Alzheimer's. I'm so excited. How do you feel?

[Jeff O'Neill]

We did. Did we do it justice? I feel pretty good about this, I have to say.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

There's so much here. All right, thank you all. We'll talk to you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It.