Quote of the Week...from Ray Bradbury

 You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.

                                                                     ---Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who wrote prolifically and is responsible for many renowned works like Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The Pedestrian...and perhaps his most famous, Fahrenheit 451, was a great lover of reading.  That last book I mentioned is what probably prompted the above quote as its setting was a future dystopia in which books were banned and burned.  I think that reading as a regular discipline or even as an enjoyable hobby has never been something that the majority of any given population...in any era...has taken to.  I also think that in today's world of Amazon, Kindle, and audiobooks, books have never been so available. Yet as I've mentioned before on this blog, those publications that haven't been digitalized and are out of print can be very hard to come by...quite unlike the music industry that has so successfully gone back to the vinyl record era and digitalized most of what has been recorded.  Regarding Bradbury's above quote, I would like to tweak the last sentence a little to read "Just get people to stop reading them critically, with discernment".  This goes especially for nonfiction works that advocate specific positions and ideologies on politics, society, history, lifestyle, dieting and the like. To enhance a culture rather than contribute to its destruction folks shouldn't just read stuff that panders to their preconceived notions and demonizes opposing perspectives and those holding them.  You need to take what's written and process it as to its truth value, as well as try to understand why the author is saying whatever he or she is saying.  Trump worshippers aren't going to expand their horizons by reading the latest Sean Hannity book, and likewise his detractors won't achieve a more broadened perspective taking up the book written by the president's niece, Mary Trump.  I'm not suggesting, either, that the two sides flip and read the "other side's" books...better instead to pick material that is light on the venom and innuendo and heavy on civil discourse.  I saw a Twilight Zone episode once where two aliens come down to Earth to abduct the greatest human in history...turns out the man in question was the world's biggest liar, but the aliens automatically believed everything he said, not possessing the capacity to discern truth from falsehood.  We can do better than that, and we can start by reading stuff that challenges us, not just whatever props up our prejudices...