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Monday, October 5, 2009
title: Farenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
genre: science fiction
pages: 179
published: 1953
first line: It was a pleasure to burn.
rated: 4 out of 5
Guy Montag is a fireman, however in this book, firemen do not put out fires, instead they burn books. Set in a future time, it is illegal to read or own books.
Farenheit 451 is the temperature it takes for a page in a book to catch fire.
One night, walking home from work, Montag meets his new neighbor, a 17 year old girl named Clarisse McClellan. Clarisse is a free thinking spirit, who surprises him with her genuine curiosity about life, she questions things instead of just accepting blind answers. She and Montag become friends and she talks to him about the past, when firefighters actually fought fires instead of burning books.
When Montag goes home that night, he finds his wife, Mildred, has overdosed on sleeping pills. He calls the medics and Mildred is saved. But Montag begins to begins to question his own way of life and his happiness.
One night while on call, Montag arrives at a womans house to burn her books. The woman refuses to leave, and instead dies that night in her burning home. Montag is greatly distressed over this and begins to have second thoughts about his way of life. While he was at the womans home, he grabbed a book to sneak out with him. It turns out Montag has been collecting and hiding books in his house for some time.
He tells his wife this and shows her his collection, but she is so brainwashed that she doesn't care about the books and wants him to burn them too. So he decides to look up a retired English professor who he knows has books stashed in his house, a man named Faber. He hopes Faber can answer some of his questions.
I read Farenheit 451 without knowing anything about it, I just knew that Ray Bradbury wrote it and that it is considered a modern classic. So when I went to my local library and stumbled upon this book, I grabbed it off the shelf and figured i'd give it a go. I am so glad I did, it is a great read.
I was hooked from page one. The storyline was really good, I found it to be creepy the way society was brainwashed and how they lived in an oppressed world without books. I liked Montag very much. It's almost like he was sleeping all that time, then finally woke up and snapped out of it.
Mildred creeped me out, especially the way she spoke, it was very disjointed, she makes offhand remarks, almost like she's drugged.
I think most off all, I enjoyed this one so much because I like books that are about books.
Here's a few of my favorite passages:
The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered.
"Do you know that some books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go."
The good writers touch life often.
This book has also been reviewed by Laura
