Fahrenheit 451

This short dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury is an extremely well written and enjoyable read. A rather unsubtle warning about the dangerous of burning books. A society is depicted where all citizens are passive consumers of rubbish TV with meaningless lives. Firemen have a different role of causing fires, burning down homes that may have books in them. The political messages are incredibly blunt and unambiguous, but that is acceptable with a topic as unambiguous as the morality of book burning.

Essentially, as with a scary amount of dystopian fiction, it's now happening. Sure, we don't burn books, but we are reading fewer and fewer and in their place are consuming mindless television. This is an important book.

Another interpretation of the book is the role of mass media stultifying society and human relationships. In the late 1950s, Bradbury commented:
"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

There is a fantastic section where Beatty explains how society came to be the way it is where anything that opposes the status quo is destroyed. It was utterly gripping. I have rarely been enthralled by a book as much as that.
Interestingly, however, the book then reaches the end of Section 1 and I was rather unmotivated to continue reading and read something else, later returning to it and being once again drawn into the world. This shows the importance of cliffhangers.

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"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."


"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."


"We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help."