Books, hockey, and a bucketful of snark

CLASSIC MOST RELEVANT TO NOW

“It was a pleasure to burn”

I remember being given a passage of literature to read for a comprehension exercise at school when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I had no idea what book it came from or who wrote it. But I found it very weird and disturbing. 

A few years later, I picked up Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and realised where the anonymous piece of writing had come from. And I found it even more disturbing.

A faster pace of life has led to people having shorter attention spans. Books are abridged and bowdlerized because of their controversial content, and eventually they are banned altogether and burned. Instead of reading, people’s leisure time now consists of watching sport or mindless soap operas on huge flat-screen TVs which take up the whole wall.

Yep, written in 1953, I would say this is pretty damn relevant.