Reading Club: Fahrenheit 451 - Εικόνα

The SNFCC Reading Club meetings continue in December, moderated by poet and translator Krystalli Glyniadaki. 

Book lovers renew their appointment for Monday, December 27, to meet up and discuss the book they read over the past month. The circle of readers will once again have the opportunity to share experiences, feelings and ideas, as well as to make new friends and exchange viewpoints, prompted by the book of the month.
Book of the month for December: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

A few words about the book for December:
What is it like to live in a society where the average attention span is minimal? Where you are trying to read something but are constantly overwhelmed by adverts all around and feel continuously distracted? Or in a society where various groups of people are increasingly complaining, ever louder, ever more assertively, because they feel offended by this or that element in the narrative of a book? At a time when people arrange gatherings to watch a series on TV but not to talk?

If this society sounds familiar to you, then writer Ray Bradbury wasn’t at all off the mark when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 back in 1953. All of the above is part of his dystopian predictions. Except that Bradbury took the narrative one step further in the dystopian society of his book: he decided that human communities, in order to avoid all these problems described above, voluntarily decide to burn all the books, thus preventing even more problems in the future. The basic aim is to combat any desire for skepticism or dissent that reading might trigger.
 

The plot:
The protagonist of Fahrenheit 451 (which, incidentally, is the autoignition temperature of paper) is a firefighter, Guy Montag, whose job (and pleasure) is to burn books wherever he finds them. Until one day, through meeting his neighbor Clarisse and talking with his former English teacher Faber, he finds himself defending, in quite an imaginative way, the wealth that books bring to our life, as well as anything that offers a slow-burning, multifaceted satisfaction instead of repeated thrills of instant gratification. 

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012 ) was an American author and screenwriter of science fiction, horror and mystery. For his influence on the science fiction literature of the 20th century, he has been dubbed the “father” of science fiction. He was awarded numerous distinctions, including the US National Medal of Arts and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
His best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Many of his works have been adapted for television or cinema.

A few words about the moderator:
Krystalli Glyniadaki
was born in 1979 in Athens. She studied Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Political Theory in London, and later Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She has published three collections of poetry in Greek (all published by Polis), the last of which—Τhe Return of the Dead—received the Greek National Literature Award for Poetry in 2018. She has been an officially invited author to the international Istanbul Book Fair and International Izmir Literature Festival, her poems have been translated into English, Turkish, German, Slovenian and Italian, and her first English-language collection of poetry is to be released in the United Kingdom soon. She works as a translator, mostly of Norwegian literature, and as a book editor, and writes pieces for Norwegian online media. Her latest love is online interactive historical documentaries (i-doc), on which she has just finished her dissertation at Bournemouth University.

 

Monday, Dec. 27 | 18:30–20:30
BOOK CASTLE

 

For adults
Up to 30 participants
Free participation by online pre-registration

Pre-registrations starts on Friday 03/12

Moderator: Krystalli Glyniadaki 
Anyone reserving a seat at the Book Club is required to have read the book of the month

To enter the event space is mandatory to demonstrate a certificate of vaccination or illness.

For all cases of an official document demonstration, a parallel identity check of the holder will be carried out.

Due to public health measures, there may be changes regarding either the staging of the event, or the maximum number of participants.

The use of face mask and social distancing measures are mandatory in indoor and outdoor areas of the SNFCC, in accordance with Hellenic National Public Health Organization regulations. 

 

As part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center's collaboration with the National Library of Greece, the book for December's Reading Club has been chosen by NLG staff members.

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