Flying Oskar: Spartanburg's Big Read

I was 17 years old the first time I’d ever heard of the classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 and it’s author Ray Bradbury. I had (ahem) acquired a copy of Playboy magazine and the famous science-fiction writer was the interview subject in that particular issue. Stunning though it may seem that a 17-year-old would actually read anything in Playboy, I read the interview. I didn’t exactly fall in love with the image of the man that I’d gleaned from reading it either.

The Spartanburg County Public Libraries' Big Read takes on a Bradbury classic.

The then 75-year-old Bradbury came across as stunningly egotistical, paranoid, and vaguely racist to me at the time. For a man who’d spent so much time writing about the future, Bradbury seemed to have nothing but contempt for the present and everyone in it. In short, the interview made Bradbury seem like little more than a bitter old man.

For years after that, whenever I thought of reading Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel about book-burning in a world where nobody cares that books are being burned, that interview would flash through my head and I’d shove the book to the back of my reading list again. Untangling the artwork from the artist has always been a bit of a problem for me.

So when I saw that the Spartanburg County Public Library was using Fahrenheit 451 as its Big Read book this year, I decided that maybe it was time I gave Mr. Bradbury’s book its due. So yesterday, I went to the library to pick up one of the library’s 4,000 free copies, and give this Big Read thing a shot.

The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” The NEA provides funding to communities for the program ranging from $2,500 to $20,000, and according to the Spartanburg CountyPublic Library’s website, they received the highest level of funding. I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I learned that little factoid. I wondered to myself how many conservatives in the county have, at different times, called for NEA’s disbandment. How many of them scoff at the idea of public funding for arts projects?

Taken that way, I look at my new taxpayer subsidized paperback with a different sort of appreciation altogether.

Sometime on Monday after this column goes up, I’ll start turning the pages in Fahrenheit 451. As I turn those pages, I expect to do it with a sense of satisfaction, bordering on smugness perhaps. That we have public funding for community reading programs at the library is a victory for sanity. That we’re allowed to have a program designed to foster the idea of reading as a shared experience is an achievement worth celebrating.

There are plenty of naysayers out there in Spartanburg who would scoff at something like the Big Read. They don’t believe in taxpayer funding for much of anything, and the idea of giving away free paperbacks to people and hosting community events like book discussions probably seems like a waste of time to them. I suppose this is just my opinion, and I’m sure that others would disagree with it vehemently, but try as I might I just can’t find many “community oriented” things that those naysayers do approve of.

Maybe it’s that pesky word. When you think about it, the word “community” does share an awful lot of letters with that evil word, “communism”. And here I thought all that ugly red-baiting was buried around the time Joseph Welch finally shut Joe McCarthy up by asking “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no decency?”

I wonder what McCarthy would have thought of the Big Read.

For the rest of us, the sane, the Big Read is an opportunity to connect to something too many of us have lost. Reading isn’t just about losing yourself in a gripping narrative, or escaping to a place that only exists within the confines of your own mind. Reading is also a chance for us to come together to share our thoughts with each other, and to hear ideas that otherwise might never have been expressed.

It’s in that spirit, the spirit of reading as a means of bringing the community together, that I want to do something different here on the Spark. Starting Monday evening, I’m going to start a thread over on the forum for people participating in the Big Read. I’m going to try to post at least once a day until I finish the book, posting my thoughts on the characters, story, plot development, and anything else that strikes me about Fahrenheit 451.

It’s a relatively short book, so I doubt it’ll take me that long to finish it, but I want to encourage everyone to come over to the forum and post your thoughts on the book too. If you’ve read it already, come on over and let me know what you thought of it. If you don’t have it, go to your closest Spartanburg Public Library branch, and pick up a copy. Show your support for initiatives like the Big Read. Programs like this only work if people like us get out there and support them. Plus, it’s a good way to stick a little public thumb in the eyes of those who’d rather you didn’t have this option.

From my perspective, that’s a win-win scenario, and I don’t get enough of those to pass one up.