Fahrenheit 2023

Best-selling author Agatha Christie’s books have reportedly become the latest target of sensitivity readers reworking or removing original passages in the new editions of Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The novels, written between 1920 and 1976, “are being stripped of certain language and descriptions that are deemed offensive,” and dialogue by “unsympathetic characters” has been cut out. Dame Christie, who died in 1976, is hardly the only target.

The James Bond literary franchise, Time magazine reports, “will receive a sensitivity review” of the 14 novels written from 1953 to 1966. The review “will see some racially offensive language and outdated stereotypes” removed from the books by Ian Fleming. The author died in 1964, the same year as “Goldfinger,” based on Fleming’s book of the same title and starring Sean Connery as James Bond and Honor Blackman as the unforgettable Pussy Galore, was released.

British author Roald Dahl passed away in 1990, and as CNN reports, his books Matilda, The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, have been “revised and edited” by an organization called Inclusive Minds.

Language relating to “gender, race, weight, mental health and violence had all been cut or revised, including the removal of words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly,’ and descriptions using the colors black and white.” The best-selling books of Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, pose other problems.

As the Associated Press reports, in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, “an Asian person is portrayed wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl.” Geisel’s If I Ran the Zoo “includes a drawing of two bare-footed African men wearing what appear to be grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.” The books, therefore,  “will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery.”

As the March 2, 2021 report notes, the books of Dr. Seuss “have been translated into dozens of languages as well as in braille and are sold in more than 100 countries.” So 30 years after his death, and nearly 120 years after his birth, the books of Theodore Geisel are being killed off. Way back in 1953, Ray Bradbury saw it all coming.

He set Fahrenheit 451 in the future when the primary task of firemen is to burn books. To prevent the books from being eliminated, people memorize the full text. Every book represents a person and to destroy a book is to destroy the author. In subsequent editions, Bradbury felt compelled to add an afterword.

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