Title: Farenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Genre: Dystopian fiction
Year of Release: 1954
Review: A world where firemen start fires.
I want you to close your eyes for a minute.
Not literally, of course, because then you wouldn’t be able to read this blog and where would that leave me? If you did though, congrats, you’ve just had a mini mini nap. No, I want you to figuratively close your eyes. It’s easier than it seems. Now that you’ve figuratively closed your eyes, and not literally I hope, try to imagine a world where firemen don’t put out fires, they start them. That’s a bit crazy, isn’t it? I agree. Bear with me. Now imagine that they start these fires to burn books.
“What an atrocity!” I hear you shout. Don’t worry, we’re on the same page.
This is the world that Bradbury has conjured up in some twisted nightmare. Guy Montag is one of these backward firemen, and there is nothing that he loves more than burning books. Conformity is his safe haven until he meets a girl who asks him if he has ever read the books he burns. It’s only once he has started on a path of knowledge that he realises his decision to think has condemned him.
Farenheit 451 is a marvel; beautiful, stylistic, yet concise writing – it can be done! More than anything else for me, the way he writes is what makes this book. Content – great. Characters – complex. Writing – beyond superb.
How could we ever do without books such as this?
Rating: 7 and a half stars
Quote: “Pity, Montag, pity. Don’t haggle and nag them; you were so recently one of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty light in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.”
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