Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by jennygaitskell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
5.0
'The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.'
This astonishing speculative novel begins, 'It was a pleasure to burn.' Montag is a pillar of his community, a fireman who sets fires to burn books. He's ashamed of his secret doubts, which grow with his wife's fake happiness, distrust of his colleagues, and the firemen's license. Guided by new friends, he takes action.
The mindless, sensation-addicted future is for me the book's most powerful feature. Written in the 40s, it's prescience added to my unease. I found this scene particularly uncomfortable: household after household stands, summoned by their full-wall three-wall TV screens to rise, look outside.
Montag himself is a hero without a goal, hard to love until the very end, but I shared his paranoid uncertainty, his bursts of fury.
The mood is bleak, the language often brutal, with wild staccato passages reminding me of beat poetry, hard bop jazz. In contrast, the theme is beautiful - reading as the means to question before finding one's own understanding, to absorb and ultimately embody. Fahrenheit 451 will certainly stay with me.
This astonishing speculative novel begins, 'It was a pleasure to burn.' Montag is a pillar of his community, a fireman who sets fires to burn books. He's ashamed of his secret doubts, which grow with his wife's fake happiness, distrust of his colleagues, and the firemen's license. Guided by new friends, he takes action.
The mindless, sensation-addicted future is for me the book's most powerful feature. Written in the 40s, it's prescience added to my unease. I found this scene particularly uncomfortable: household after household stands, summoned by their full-wall three-wall TV screens to rise, look outside.
Montag himself is a hero without a goal, hard to love until the very end, but I shared his paranoid uncertainty, his bursts of fury.
The mood is bleak, the language often brutal, with wild staccato passages reminding me of beat poetry, hard bop jazz. In contrast, the theme is beautiful - reading as the means to question before finding one's own understanding, to absorb and ultimately embody. Fahrenheit 451 will certainly stay with me.