Fahrenheit 451 ||Book Review

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury || 2.5/5

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television ‘family’. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

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I have super mixed feelings about this book. For one, the message is lovely. But entertainment wise? I was not entertained.

• There is little-to-no character development. True, Mildred and the others are meant to be shallow characters, but what about people like Clarisse? She starts the avalanche of events, but she has very little page time. Even Montag is not quite fully developed.
• I love beautiful prose and metaphors. But at some point, you reach too much, and the prose just muddies the readability of the work. Fahrenheit 451 reached that point a long time ago.
• The pacing was off. The beginning and middle were quite slow and it seemed as though all the action was stuffed into the ending. I’d probably be happier without the action at the end. It didn’t fit the rest of the book.
• The plot didn’t make complete sense or fit together. Some parts jumped without fully filling in the gaps between.
• I really like the message. I bet most bookdragons would. It’s very applicable to life today. Like peeps. Get off your phones when your REAL LIFE FRIENDS ARE WITH YOU. Here’s a post I wrote about that a while ago about my frustrations with this. It isn’t even my friends. It’s just walking down the hallway and noticing other people doing it.

Read 7/28/2018 – 7/29/2018 and Reread 8/29/2018 – 9/3/2018

Currently Reading: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman