Is "Fahrenheit 451" Our Most Overrated Required Reading? | Josh Lieb | Big Think

Is "Fahrenheit 451" Our Most Overrated Required Reading?

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Is Ray Bradbury’s most famous work nothing more than an “authorial circle jerk”?

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Josh Lieb:

Josh Lieb is the former Producer and Show Runner of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. His credits include stints as Executive Producer of NewsRadio and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He won 7 Prime Time Emmys as a producer and writer for The Daily Show. In 2009, he published a young adult novel, I Am A Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, which was a New York Times Bestseller.

Lieb was raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and graduated from Harvard, where he was an editor of The Lampoon, the college humor magazine. After graduation, he found work writing for Twisted Puppet Theater, The Jon Stewart Show, and NewsRadio. He subsequently worked as a producer or consultant on shows including The Simpsons, Drawn Together, Sirens, Nikki, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Lieb's tenure at The Daily Show lasted from 2006 to 2010, during which he also served as Executive Producer of “The Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” and as co-editor and co-author of Earth: The Book.

In 2013, he wrote and directed a series of comedic shorts to raise money and awareness for the charity Water.Org. Stars featured in the shorts included Matt Damon, Jessica Biel, Sir Richard Branson, and Bono.

Penguin/ Random House released Lieb's second novel, Ratscalibur, in 2015.

In October 2016, NBCUniversal announced an exclusive writing deal with Lieb.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Do you agree with your protagonist that Fahrenheit 451 is overrated?

Josh Lieb: I do. That’s something else I share with Oliver. You know, and that’s unfair – I’d say it’s unfair, I should have reread Fahrenheit 451 before going into it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There’s inertia right there. Yeah, that’s a book I despise. Ray Bradbury, here’s another example of someone who has that long-lived writing career. Although, in his case, and I don’t need to be picking a fight with Ray Bradbury I guess, but I don’t know if it’s entirely admirable. Let me say this. Ray Bradbury–I certainly went through a science fiction phase, like a lot of teen boys do. And I read a lot of Ray Bradbury and I enjoyed quite a bit. His Martian Chronicles is some wonderful stuff, and The Illustrated Man, I liked a lot of those stories. Dandelion Wine, was that it? I just named some – and Ray Bradbury, a pretty lyrical fellow, but boy, yeah, Fahrenheit 451 as an authorial circle jerk. Absolutely. And maybe in the 50’s or whenever he wrote it, 1953 or something, the idea of book banning, book burning, seemed a lot more tangible in the wake of Nazi Germany and Stalinist purges, and McCarthyism, you really thought, boy they might get rid of books. And obviously banned in Boston, there were books banned. But, I mean, an author writing a book about how wonderful books are, preposterous, and books are great, books aren’t everything. Yeah, I found the dystopia in that book really unconvincing.

On a similar topic, on a similar dystopia—1984, much more plausible. And there’s a book about limiting thought, limiting language, destroying books, certainly. But it wasn’t about books. It was much broader, it actually looked at what it would mean as a society, rather than just that the one thing that was saving us from fascism were our books. So, yeah, it’s a bad book. I recommend you read it so that you don’t like it. So, you agree with me on it. But I think every kid sort of gets stuck reading it at some point.

You know what’s another Ray Bradbury book I remember hating was Something Wicked This Way Comes. I had to read that one too. And that was another one where it was these charlatans coming in – I shouldn’t have read any of him because they did make us read him in school, and I think he was supposed to be wonderful and to set our imaginations on fire and it’s that kind of setting your imagination on fire that I find pretty stultifying. Because it’s so, it makes such a religion of fantasy and of whimsy, and of you know, real fantasy, and real whimsy is a lot more grounded and less flowery, I think.

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