This is a book I should have read back when I was a teen, but somehow I never did. It's a widely celebrated book, dealing as it does with book burning, which sadly remains a problem even today.
The book's about a fireman named Guy Montag, living in an America where books are illegal. Those who own them are whisked away for re-education, and their books are burned by the firemen. Books, after all, contain ideas, and those ideas can be dangerously subversive and interfere with the happiness that is everyone's God-given right.
Looked at in that light, you're likely to expect the book to be about a totalitarian state that is trying to keep people in the dark, as any number of petty thugs with small minds and big Cultural Revolutions have tried over the centuries. The book is a little more insidious than that, though. It's about how we have done this to ourselves.
There are essentially two poles that Montag moves between, and each is revelatory in what it says about America as it may have been, and America as it may be. The first pole is Clarisse, an unusual 17-year-old who stops to enjoy the world around her. While cars drive past at 100 mph or more, Clarisse walks. She smells flowers, listens to the wind, and looks at the leaves. She tells Montag stories she's heard from her uncle about the Way Things Used to Be, when people talked with one another, and neighbors knew one another, and people stopped to enjoy themselves and allowed themselves to be miserable at times. She's the naif innocent, but she represents the purity of what even in the 1950s Bradbury sensed was being lost.
The other pole is Montag's wife, Mildred, who spends her day in a room with television screens on three walls, watching shows that are computer-altered to appear personalized for her, down to the ads. The shows are stupid, pathetic, utterly banal -- but to Mildred, they are her family. The thought of not watching the TV -- of not getting a fourth TV screen to complete the room -- is unbearable. When Montag does turn the TV off at one point, she gets hysterical.
And just think, Bradbury wrote this in the 1950s, before the days of widescreen TV, before we had 24-hour cable and satellite signals, and before the advent of the Internet with its personalized entertainment options.
In Montag's world, books were banned because no one read them anymore, and not enough people cared. Books are dismissed as meaningless and impenetrable, and so the ideas they contain are lost, because those ideas could make people uncomfortable.
It's an interesting book, and it probably would have been better read at a time when I wasn't six hours into a dreadfully insomniatic night, but I'm glad I finally read it.
The book's about a fireman named Guy Montag, living in an America where books are illegal. Those who own them are whisked away for re-education, and their books are burned by the firemen. Books, after all, contain ideas, and those ideas can be dangerously subversive and interfere with the happiness that is everyone's God-given right.
Looked at in that light, you're likely to expect the book to be about a totalitarian state that is trying to keep people in the dark, as any number of petty thugs with small minds and big Cultural Revolutions have tried over the centuries. The book is a little more insidious than that, though. It's about how we have done this to ourselves.
There are essentially two poles that Montag moves between, and each is revelatory in what it says about America as it may have been, and America as it may be. The first pole is Clarisse, an unusual 17-year-old who stops to enjoy the world around her. While cars drive past at 100 mph or more, Clarisse walks. She smells flowers, listens to the wind, and looks at the leaves. She tells Montag stories she's heard from her uncle about the Way Things Used to Be, when people talked with one another, and neighbors knew one another, and people stopped to enjoy themselves and allowed themselves to be miserable at times. She's the naif innocent, but she represents the purity of what even in the 1950s Bradbury sensed was being lost.
The other pole is Montag's wife, Mildred, who spends her day in a room with television screens on three walls, watching shows that are computer-altered to appear personalized for her, down to the ads. The shows are stupid, pathetic, utterly banal -- but to Mildred, they are her family. The thought of not watching the TV -- of not getting a fourth TV screen to complete the room -- is unbearable. When Montag does turn the TV off at one point, she gets hysterical.
And just think, Bradbury wrote this in the 1950s, before the days of widescreen TV, before we had 24-hour cable and satellite signals, and before the advent of the Internet with its personalized entertainment options.
In Montag's world, books were banned because no one read them anymore, and not enough people cared. Books are dismissed as meaningless and impenetrable, and so the ideas they contain are lost, because those ideas could make people uncomfortable.
It's an interesting book, and it probably would have been better read at a time when I wasn't six hours into a dreadfully insomniatic night, but I'm glad I finally read it.
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