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…is Vallejo still at the point of having to declare bankruptcy, which has been blamed in large part due to its union-negotiated contracts with the police and fire departments? Why is there no ongoing mention of it in local, state, or national media? With the exception of the ongoing reports posted by the Vallejo Independent Bulletin website found online at http://ibvallejo.com, this story seems to have disappeared. The problem has not. What would Ray Bradbury do? I don’t know. I do know that the JFK Library book sale is ongoing until April 12.

One of the best bargains in town can be found at the John F. Kennedy Library’s annual spring book sale. Every year the library withdraws a number of books from its stock of titles available for checkout and offers them for sale to the public. This practice is a good fundraiser for the library and a good way for the reading public to pick up some inexpensive books. All hardcover books are sold, regardless of title, genre, or writer’s status, at one dollar per book inch. You just can’t find a better deal at ANY bookstore, unless there is one called “The Bookstore Where We Sell Hardcover Books for One Dollar per Book Inch.” If it does exist, the yellow pages and Google have not been told about it.

I picked up a number of titles from my ever-growing list of “must read” books and its companion, the “must read it again” list. Finding copies of “Cosmopolis” by Don De Lillo, “The Wayward Bus” by John Steinbeck, “The Cider House Rules” by John Irving, and “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth allowed me to put some checkmarks on both lists. I picked up “The Lantern Bearers” by Ronald Frame, one of my favorite books at JFK; my inner Daffy Duck voice was screaming, “It’s mine! Mine! Do you hear me? MINE!” once I saw it on one of the “Fiction” tables. I found a collection of Theodore Sturgeon short stories for my friend Sam, who loves science fiction and will appreciate this book. I also found some books that grabbed my interest by writers I know nothing about: “Bathsheba” by the Swedish novelist Torgny Lindgren, and an anthology of New Zealand’s winners of the Katherine Mansfield short story award titled “Oh, to be a writer, a REAL writer!”

I even found a copy of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” This one may have been the best catch of all. I had recently watched the Francois Truffaut-directed film version of this novel on a “free movies” website that kept crashing. I eventually had to discontinue watching it with about fifteen minutes remaining. I have read the book and seen the movie a number of times, although it had been maybe twenty years prior to my above-mentioned attempt, and I remembered everything except a certain aspect of the plot that led to the climax of the story. Now I have the answer. I will not tell you anything about that aspect or the ending; I told my friend Ray about the ending to the movie “Carrie” back when it was first released (I don’t know why), he told his brother Fred (just because), and we now refer to telling each other too much about new movies as “the Carrie rule.”

One thing I had forgotten about Bradbury’s novel was its “Author’s Afterword” section, where he describes how certain publishers and editors had attempted to either abridge or censor his work, which he found similar to the plot and point of his novel. “Fahrenheit 451,” if you are not familiar with it, is set in a society that burns books deemed “wrong” for its citizens. The books are burned by Firemen, who would drive in their Firetrucks to the site housing the offending literature, gather and ignite it, and wait until each page is reduced to cinders. One of the Firemen has decided that this action is wrong and – well, read it. It’s a great book.

Bradbury’s afterword also mentions how “digression is the soul of wit.” So here is a digression, although it may lack in wit: is Vallejo still at the point of having to declare bankruptcy, which has been blamed in large part due to its union-negotiated contracts with the police and fire departments? Why is there no ongoing mention of it in local, state, or national media? With the exception of the ongoing reports posted by the Vallejo Independent Bulletin website found online at http://ibvallejo.com, this story seems to have disappeared. The problem has not.

What would Ray Bradbury do?

I don’t know. I do know that the JFK Library book sale is ongoing until April 12. Check it out. Buy a book. The library is located at 505 Santa Clara Street in Vallejo. For additional information call 552-1738. And watch out for the Firemen.

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