Fahrenheit 451

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Pages: 190

Genre: Classic, Science Fiction

Grade: B+

Synopsis: This book, written 55 years ago, takes a frightening look at the future. In the futuristic society, firemen don't fight fires, they start them in order to burn books. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman that goes through a personal crisis after meeting Clarisse, a girl that posses qualities of life that Montag has never seen. Montag's wife and everybody in the society is constantly enraptured by the walls of television screens that they each have in their house and with always going somewhere as quickly as possible, never stopping to look around or think.

Why I Chose This Book: Alison asked me to get it from the library for her, I thought I'd sneak it in before I give it to her.

My Review: I thought that I had read this book before, but after reading it I'm fairly certain that I never have. I gained the most from this book by reading the Afterword and Coda where Bradbury explains many of the things going on in the book. I especially enjoyed this book because it gets you thinking and trying to determine whether or not there are any parallels between the society that he has explained in his book and the one in which we currently live. Either way, when government or minority groups of people start censoring things then it can be very hard to turn back the tide.

From the Book: "(p. 83, Faber speaking) Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"(p. 177, from the Coda) Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony..."

"(p. 178) For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals which to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall."