Few appreciate irony as much as I do, so understand that I understand this review. The message of this book is decent: knowledge should not be censored. However, the rest of the book is utter shit. I found myself actually screaming at several points as Bradbury spent minutes and dozens of metaphors and allusions referring to one insignificant detail of the plot. It is too damn flowery to be understandable by anyone! In other words, an English teacher's dream. In addition, the story was about the message not the story in and of itself. Those of you who know me understand that this is that I detest most about classics, tied with how everyone reveres them without reading them.

The Coda and Afterword just add to the confuse making me confused on whether Bradbury is a very hateful man or just a hypocrite. The main plot of the novel itself is that the majority rule canceled out intellectualism while in the Coda (maybe Afterword, I don't remember which was which) Bradbury blasts minorities (all, including racial, religious, etc.) for creating an overly sensitive society. Oddly enough, his heroes are the minority. Ha. Furthermore, the Coda is a hefty "Fuck you" to anyone that wants to critique his work in any way not positive. Therefore, I feel obliged to respond in turn: "Fuck you, Ray Bradbury. Your writing style is shit and I won't force it on my worst enemy." Harsh, I know, but true. If you do need to read this book, I suggest a Cliff Notes version as long as you can appreciate that irony.

3.8

a world without books is my idea of dystopia too

"The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers."

I can't. I just can't.

(Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.)

*Need time to get over this.

I am still curious about the audio-capsule (this guy - a genius, he already predicted wireless headphones or chips, whichever suits) and the procaine needles (I still need to know the biochemistry and mechanism of action of procaine. This guy brought back alive the old science soul in me ☺️).


Beatty. I liked this character. Intimidating and boisterous to the max. (And I am always in awe of someone who can quote quotes like breathing in and breathing out. I am sure he had a hidden The Beauty and The Beast kind of library. Don't you ever kid me that he didn't!)

Faber. (Was he one of the Faber and Faber? I highly doubt this ☺️ His quest and enthusiasm as an old frail man to save books and to reproduce more. Well, I hope you can throw that responsibility to me, Mr Faber.)

Montag. (The inbetween one. I see him as the one struggling to live the dreams of all the book lovers, not understanding much what was going on but yes, the belief that something phenomenal is hidden in books and he was ready to fight for it. I wish he was here with me now. I would make him read all the books in my shelves. Like he would kiss my books until he dropped. Yes, 2gether forever.)

Most amusing short-lived side character: Claresse. Ethereal and so normal that she mesmerized me with all her calmness and fictionalized reality.

Mildred. Wife of Montag. The most annoying character ever. Suicidal, an addict and so damn unreliable. (Author, you made your point.)

The first half was good but it's the second half that all hell broke loose and I wasn't reading the book fast enough!

I was rooting for the character to save the last few remnants (if I can say that!) and escape from the Hound! It was utter madness during the last few pages!


I love the writing. I can feel the angst. I could touch the emptiness. I could experience the want of emotions and feelings. I could sense the hunger for change. I could live the adventure of saving what's most important. One of the best dystopian classics indeed!

Some books are about great ideas, and some are about great characters, with a powerful, well-crafted plot. Some books manage to do both. Farenheit 451, the temperature at which paper will burn, is one of the former kinds of books, I think. Science fiction, it’s a kind of allegory of democratic ideas, a warning to mankind in the shadow of WWII and the Holocaust and Hiroshima, written in 1953, less than a decade after that horrific war ended, and in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, which had a chilling censoring effect on American society. I was shocked to be reminded of that publication date, because I seemed to recall the book was a late sixties cry for freedom, with its young hippie child Clarisse disrupting the young unhappily married Guy Montag’s life as a book-burning “fireman.”
And of course it was very popular in the sixties for its insistence on the importance of free-thinking and anti-authoritarianism.

F451 is pretty didactic in places, with its debate between Beatty and Faber, and its caricatures of mind-enslavement, including Montage’s wife Mildred, who would prefer to spend thousands of dollars on a large screen television in spite of the fact that it would cost 1/3 of her husband’s annual salary, or the binary opposite emblem of freedom, “insane” 17-year old Clarisse; we don’t really know who Montag or anyone in the book really is, admittedly. By that I mean there isn't a lot of character development, except with respect to the politicization of Montag. But I still say that in spite of those literary flaws that it remains one of the most important books ever written, a kind of anthem for the importance of reading and art and its stand against totalitarianism and for individuality and humanity.

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

As for reading, the principal thing that firemen like Montag burn in this book is books. “It was a pleasure to burn,” Montag early on contends, until he learns, “A book is a loaded gun.”

We learn that reading may serve practical ends, as we face yet another war and the need for self-efficacy and autonomy. “Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

Montag, having met Clarisse, and after initially claiming that kerosene is like perfume for him, comes to see that he is deeply unhappy compared to her; over time, he must make a choice between the forces of creation and destruction: “Those who don't build must burn” (or as Dylan sings, "He who isn't busy being born, is busy dying).

And Montag chooses what Bradbury encourages we readers choose: “Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

It’s not so much books themselves that matter as the ideas about the world that are contained in them, or an attitude about how to live in the world that is found in the best of them: “It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Fahrenheit 451 creates a great demonstration of the phrase, “we are what we read,” as people in the end memorize books or poems or chapters or whatever they can do to keep the burned books alive. They live out in the woods (nature) and create a supportive intellectual community. They internalize the books (as in many ways all readers do who experience literature) and make themselves available to each other and others unhappy with the state of the world:

“I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

Bradbury might have been in a stage of righteous rage to write Fahrenheit 451 at the height of the McCarthy era, in 1953. And we have had so much book burning in the last century or so, such as the Nazi and Soviet destruction of “subversive” art and music and literature. Bradbury knew what ignorance could lead to self indulgence, the lazy pursuit of happiness at all costs, even the sacrifice of self-knowledge. TV was one thing he was particularly worried about, but any mindless pleasure was a worry for him, including sports, or drugs, anything that mind-numbingly divorces one from personal or political awareness. Opiates of the people, Marx wrote.

It is deeply ironic that Bradbury discovered that his own book Farenheit 451 was censored for decades. When he visited a school in the Chicago area where he had been invited to read from and talk about his work, he realized he had forgotten his book, so he borrowed a copy of the version the class was reading. He discovered that words and passages deemed offensive had been excised by the publisher! In subsequent editions his text was restored, and his story about this ridiculous act of censorship is always included as an appendix.

You know, don’t beat me up for this, but I think I prefer stories such as Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles to Fahrenheit 451, but I still like it for the stand it takes against mechanization (That Mechanical Hound!), and the very moving images of those human books--we readers!-- at the end. It matters that a woman whose books are being burned decides to stay with her books rather than live without them, because they represent her and a world of the exchange of ideas, and of beauty. Fahrenheit 451 may be flawed, but it is unforgettable, and necessary, especially as we think that an American President proudly states that he doesn’t read books, or participate in any meaningful way in the humanities. He cuts funding for libraries, for public schools and universities he sees as liberal (which is to say humane) bastions. If you think of F451 in that way, we on Goodreads can very well be revolutionaries, part of the resistance, for just reading a range of books. We should buy dozens of copies of this book and share it with the world! We can all use a little Bradbury pro-humanities ranting right now!

3.5 Very poetic. Loved most of the writing. But something was missing in the plot. Cannot pinpoint.

Its 4:27 in the morning, an infusion of grey darkness and elusive daylight can be seen yonder my room window as I lay awake exhausted of the little sleep I had, I feel the dull pain in head and the numbness beneath, and I know I’ve read something very sad. I connect with the characters I meet and the words I read at the extent of being them, I am the books I read and they aren’t very pleasant. There is deep loneliness in this book, the lonely of heart and the lonely of mind. It becomes unbearably sad, and even for a shortest while, I want this besieging loneliness to wane, the strength of Bradbury's vision leaves this future etched in our minds long after the book is finished.
This is the story of a world where books are outlawed and if found are burnt by firemen, where wall to wall telescreens numb the minds and give a phony sense of pleasure and heightened delight, where people talk about nothing at all that is life, where relationships are completely empty of emotion and the systemic stifling of minds is overpowering everything, where if you were spotted with a book down your coat will be vaporized then and there, where people have all kind of amusement save words and scent of a book, and true sadness is, they’re not bothered at all. That is the world where one dark night fireman Montag overwhelmed by the power of unknown, steals a book from the home he burns along with the woman who refuses to leave!
"You weren't there, you didn't see! There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."

And the curiosity to know the unknown, brings the fire in his own home, as Montag bathes the house with kerosene we can’t help but love him even more, bewildered and betrayed Montag runs with a book down his chest, the book he knows nothing of, the book he knows not how to read, the book he stole with the sheer purpose of knowledge and nothing more, now all he has in the world is the book he holds, and he runs, as far as his trembling legs let him, this is the most powerful and achingly visual scene ever written with such deft and heart the reader is left exasperated too as he reaches the shore.
“That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”

We never come to know why we are living until we realize what we’d die for, everyone must leave something behind when he dies, a child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. I am little concerned about the thematic debate that aroused about this tale, as censorship is the tongue tip one and much referred by later events or the technophobia of Ray, as he mentions TV, radio being the sources to kill thinking minds and putting them in a sham happiness, It’s well understood as the time book was written TV was so fascinating a thing who talked to you and showed you the world while you being on your sofa,yet,Ray could’ve been mindful books are always read by a little community out of whole population, there are bad books and there are good TV shows, so the book falls short in this prophetic clumsiness.
What the whole tale stores for us is importance of books in our lives and what we hold dear in the face of adversity, as choices make who we are, and what will our coming ones be!!
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

Originally published in 1954, and although not that badly aged, the book about the world where firemen burn books seems to have lost some of its lustre and allure over the years. Bradbury's world building is phenomenal for this being written in the early 1950s... but the third act just doesn't work for me. 6 out of 12.

2019 read; 2009 read

With a remarkably prescient depiction of melancholic days spent glaring at screens, the substitution of thought by the babble of media, and a culture of chasing pleasure and titillation, this classic should've made an intelligent, thought-provoking read. And to an extent, it was -- initially an odd, stimulating medley of the cerebral (a shallow existence, the ensuing ennui, pervasive censorship) and the groovy (robotic bank-tellers, wireless earphones, toasters sprouting hands and whatnot) -- an interesting idea to start with but stretched too far to make a point about censoring literature and suppressing thought. The themes explored are as relevant as they would have been in the '50s but the entire effect seemed awkward and contrived and even somewhat didactic.

There is no character I gave two hoots about, least of all Clarisse, who put me off the book even before I could glean a morsel of enjoyment from the writing. I'm truly grateful that she was done away with in the first few pages, I was tired of rolling my eyes at her overstated joie de vivre and needless curiosity. What kept me invested was the prose, which came alive when Mr. Bradbury chose to focus on nature -- passages about dandelions, stars, fresh hay in the farms, rivers, and forests -- beautifully recounted and passionately rendered.

Creo que lo más impactante de este libro es que fue escrito en los años '50. Ray Bradbury fue realmente un visionario, que logró plasmar en su obra de una forma casi caricaturesca muchos de los problemas que nos afectan hoy en día: la falta de comunicación, las dificultades para socializar, las relaciones desechables, las minorías de todo tipo (muy bien caracterizadas en la explicación de Beatty), la industria de las comunicaciones que en muchos casos nos bombardea con basura disfrazada de diversión y que, a pesar de todo, sólo fomenta personas descontentas y depresivas, que no hayan satisfacción en las pequeñas maravillas de la vida.

Sin embargo y a pesar de que es un libro bastante corto, me costó terminarlo. El estilo narrativo, al menos en la primera mitad, lo sentí muy agobiante y confuso. Reconozco que hacia el final mi experiencia lectora mejoró bastante, pero me quedé con demasiadas interrogantes. Aún así, valoro las profundas reflexiones que provoca.

n  Reto #43 PopSugar 2018: Un libro que estaba siendo leído por un extraño en un lugar públicon

[5.0⭐]

Extraordinary novel which still resonates!! I remembered enjoying Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 several years ago. This time, it felt even more powerful. There are some great dystopian novels out there--1984, Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, Oryx & Crake. Many others come to mind. What's different about Fahrenheit 451 is the sense that it is okay to hope for better days. Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, for instance, ends well after Offred's story has ended and Gilead is an academic subject rather than an oppressive government. Despite the acts of resistance in the narrative, optimism is in short supply. While there is concern that knowledge is under attack (both in Fahrenheit 451 and in current debates), Bradbury lets us hope that knowledge will win out, that the future will win out.