A sci-fi classic about a future in which all books are burnt forms the focus of a three-month-long drive by Dorchester-based organizations to get kids(and adults) back into reading and discussing literature. Once more the Adams Street Branch Library will partner with UMass Boston-based WUMB Radio to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.
For the third year in a row, WUMB has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts(NEA)to manage a Boston-area Big Read project,part of a nationwide crusade to restore reading to the center of American culture.
Prompted by the alarming results of a 2004 NEA study that found literary reading in America is declining rapidly, especially among the young, The Big Read provides citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities with events devoted specifically to the book (panel discussions, book discussions) and events using the book as a point of departure, such as screenings of films with themes related to those in the book.
In 2008, WUMB and its Dot partners orchestrated events around Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” then in 2009, around Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
The work selected for Big Read: Boston 2010 is Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” In this prophetic 1951 work, Guy Montag is a “firefighter” who lives in a lonely, isolated future society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firefighters to burn any books on sight.
People in this society, including Montag’s wife, are drugged into compliancy and get their information from wall-length television screens. After Montag falls in love with book-hoarding rebel Clarisse, he begins to read contraband books and to question the government’s motives behind book-burning.
WUMB is partnering with 40 local Boston organizations, schools, and libraries to present more than 100 activities and events in celebration of this thought-provoking work . The radio station has been distributing free reader’s guides, teacher’s guides, audio versions, and some copies of this now-more-relevant-than-ever book.
In the latter category, UMass-Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will offer four-week Thursday morning course in April, offering seniors free copies of this visionary parable of a society gone awry.
But WUMB’s most consistent and major local collaborator has been Elisa Birdseye, reference librarian at the Adams Street Branch Library, which coincidentally opened the very year Bradbury’s novel was published. Since the beginning of February, Birdseye has been running a Monday Matinee Film Series, “Burning Ideas: Freedom, Censorship and the Free Expression of Thought.”
Next up, on March 1, Birdseye will screen “The Lives of Others,” the winner of the 2006 Best Foreign Film Oscar, about the German secret police. The series highlight will doubtless be the March 15 showing of Francois Truffaut’s 1966 movie version of “Fahrenheit 451.”
For a complete list of past and future events related to Big Read: Boston 2010, visit wumb.org/thebigread/.
