Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Bought this book at a used book store in Asheville, North Carolina over Thanksgiving. It is one of my roommates favorite books, and I was ashamed that I had never read this classic. Also, it is a short book, and after The War of the End of the World, I needed a quick read. At a little over a hundred pages, it took me longer than it should have, due to some friends visiting for the weekend.
I liked this book. It is the simple story of Guy Montag, who burns books and houses for a living. It is a futuristic world where books are illegal. Society is dumbed down in order to stay happy. However, Guy realizes quickly on that he is not happy after he meets a neighborhood girl who loves to explore and learn and love life and nature. Guy questions his own job, his marriage, and his curiosity to read overwhelms him and he builds a collection of books. He seeks out a retired English professor who agrees to teach him how to analyze what he is reading. But Guy is quickly found out by the other firemen when his wife rats him out. They force him to burn his own house down, but before he is arrested, Guy kills the fire captain, Beatty, and escapes town. In the woods outside town, he meets a band of other renegade book lovers, and Guy learns that there are thousands out there just like him, and they have to wait patiently and remember books until this dark age passes. The book ends with the city being destroyed by a nuclear bomb in a war.
It is a simple story, and the action moves fast without too much buildup. Guy changes from fireman to revolutionary too quickly in my opinion. There were also questions I had about why Captain Beatty hated books so much, even though he could quote them endlessly. Howevery, the story needs to be looked at for what it actually is, a fable about the perils of censorship and what the world could look like. In the world in the book, it is not the government that imposed censorship, it was first what the public wanted. It became so that each minority and interest group wanted certain passages blocked in each book, and soon the need for books disappeared entirely. There was too much focus on the television and fast cars. Even though Bradbury wrote it in the early 1950's, it's amazing how much he could predict the numbing entertainment forces that would distract us now.
The world is destroyed at the end, but humanity always knows how to pick itself up and rebuild, and we need to learn from past mistakes, which are why books are so important. The book ends on a hopeful note that things can and will change. As a bibliophile, I loved some of the subject matter. I hope my library and this blog can someday be the beacon of light that can help Guy in the future, haha. Three and a half out of five stars.
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