This was my first Ray Bradbury book. Do you know - that with 1, 117, 082 ratings, and
28, 668 reviews-I didn't have a clue what to expect from this book? I may have been the only person living under a rock - down deep beneath the earth -who knew nothing about this story! My Goodness .......
"I CANT IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT BOOKS!!!!!"

I have in my hands a copy of the 60th Anniversary Edition. Neil Gaiman wrote the Introduction.... and really excellent I might add! Just beautiful introduction about Fahrenheit 451 being speculative fiction....."if this goes on......." story. Ray Bradbury was writing about his present, which is our past. He was warning us about things; some of those things are obvious, and some of them, half a century later, are harder to see.

.....First: Many readers say 'that readers', should read this book: I agree!
.....Fireman no longer put out fires-- but instead burn houses that have books inside.
.....The prose is beautiful- powerful - a tribute to the value of books.
.....Ray Bradbury created a world where watching TV is what is consider socializing.
.....TV is a baby sitter for busy parents. Sounds like present day to me! This is still a concern!!!

.....One night -one fireman - Guy Montag - meets a young almost 17 year old girl, Clarisse McClellan, who asks Montag, "Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!" But soon, Montag begins to question the
forbidden and begins to steal books. ..... As the story unfolds, Montag bumps up against challenges - scary situations - sad and dangerous situations---

This is an INSANE WORLD --- played out to extremes --- but frightening that it resembles much of our world today. -- and that is even 'more' frightening!

Towards the end of the copy of this 60th Anniversary edition is "The Story of Fahrenheit 451". I found it fascinating. The story about renting typewriters at UCLA library - paying a dime for every half hour to write this story -- had me laughing. ( sorry for laughing at Bradbury's suffering when the typewriter would jam.....but I think his story will be helpful to me on those days when I have computer breakdowns-- in the COMFORT of my own home!!!!

Fabulous- - great excerpts on every page - A STAND FOR INTOLERANCE!!!

You only need to get a couple of pages into “Fahrenheit 451” to realize this bookless future isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Sure, the dreaded textbooks might be a thing of the past, but it also means a life without Austen, Tolkien, and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. People are dull and thoughtless, the government has a creepy amount of control over the population, plumbers have replaced medics, and firemen no longer put out fires -- they start them.

In “Fahrenheit 451”: books are illegal, free thought is essentially prohibited, and activities are tightly organized. No, this isn't WWE: Smackdown -- this is the future. The weird part is that much of the restrictions on the general populous are self-enforced. The government has taken away the citizens’ ability to dissent, and veiled all dissatisfaction with a cheap version of "happiness," a.k.a. TV. The more I think about it, the more relevant this novel seems. It isn’t just about a book nerd’s nightmare, but Ray Bradbury is also writing about the effect mass media would have on the populace -- resulting in a populace that lost not just its interest in seeking the truth, but its ability to do so.

In this new age of fake news and internet conspiracy, this book is more chilling than ever because what we’re seeing in our reality is possibly Bradbury’s terrifying vision of the future playing out (just more slowly than he imagined). In the novel, Captain Beatty explains the sequence of events: Television and sports shortened attention spans, and books began to be abridged and truncated in order to accommodate those shorter attention spans. At the same time, small groups of people complained about language and concepts in books that were now offensive, and the firemen were assigned to destroy books in order to protect people from concepts they would be troubled by. A little close to home? Things are certainly nowhere near that bad right now -- and yet, the seeds are clearly there.

“Fahrenheit 451” goes far beyond the exaggerated concept of firemen burning books to destroy knowledge -- it’s a succinct and frighteningly accurate analysis of precisely how our society could collapse without a single shot being fired, and a dark mirror of our modern age where unchallenging entertainment is available to us at all times, on devices we carry with us at all times, ready and waiting to drown out any input we don’t want to hear… Thank God we still have books though!

O livro é sensacional, mas não leiam a última nota do autor pra não se decepcionarem.

Thermal utilization is an all time burner

It´s more about the language than the plot
Bradbury has such a unique writing style, everything comes so smoothly and elaborately, full of metaphors and lively language. This, his most famous one, is a softer alternative to Orwell and Huxley, a more philosophical approach to the topic of censorship. Certainly one of the great works of the 20th century, if not of all time, reducing the story to some essential elements that

Can be seen in Brave new world and 1984 too
A love story, an awakening antagonist, mass dumbing down by passive media consumption, substance abuse, propaganda, and a little grain of hope for a better tomorrow. It´s closer to Brave new world than to 1984 because the mind penetration aspect of brainwashing is bigger than pure death squad brutality. It´s also simply Bradburys style to avoid big action scenes and focus on character development, deeper meaning, and the language itself to create a picture of, well, freaking reality in very many places.

That´s by far not his top performance
I understand why his other, as good and even better, works aren´t as appreciated as this short one. Bradbury is at his best when he is writing short story collections under a main theme, be it The Martian chronicles
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
or The Illustrated Man
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
One could go and start searching for all the interconnections between the stories and how perfectly they fit together, but the problem of having to begin again and again and getting out of reading flow is one of the main reasons why short stories aren´t selling so great. Maybe it was popular those days, I don´t know, but in the case of The Martian Chronicles, one of the first space opera novels could have been possible, the same with The Illustrated Man. It´s sadly one of the worst cases of unused serial production potential.

He was such a great writer and I don´t get why he didn´t rewrite all the material he had with those short stories into one or more longer novels. It somehow feels to me as if he had a tendency to avoid longer novels, but just imagine how it would have been if he had written them or even a series instead of all of those unique short stories. Boy, he would have owned them all. I mean, Stephen King names him and Lovecraft as main inspirations and the more often I read something from one of these titans, the more I have to agree on how my beloved master of horror came to his writing style.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

“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.”

In Guy Montag’s world, fireman start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book.

Can I preface this review with a PSA - if you have read Fahrenheit 451 and you hated it... please try another Bradbury book! This one was so different to the other Bradburys that I have read and loved, in terms of tone, writing, warmth, themes... Everything! Pick up one of the Green Town books (Something Wicked This Way Comes or Dandelion Wine) or The October Country.

Whilst this may not be a new favourite by Bradbury, I did really appreciate the message behind this story. Anything that highlights the importance of books and reading is going to score a few brownie points! I found Bradbury’s dystopian world incredibly interesting and terrifying, and really loved the part where the creation of this current world was explained.

It was scary how relevant it is to today’s world. The similarities between a book written in 1953 and current day hits a little close to home. We are overwhelmed and overstimulated with tv and the media, but luckily there are still plenty of us who read.

Although Bradbury’s writing remains as quotable and descriptive as ever, there was a certain coldness to this book. I didn’t care much for any of the characters. That was probably my main criticism - I just felt very detached from it all. All the Bradbury that I’ve read so far has made me feel all warm and cosy inside, so Fahrenheit 451 feels a little jarring in comparison.

I wanted to understand why so many people absolutely adore this book and hold it in such high regard as one of their all-time favourites, so I read a few gushing reviews on goodreads... and I honestly just feel a little sad that I couldn’t connect with it in the same way that others have. But that’s reading for you!

Overall, glad I finally read it. Some parts were fantastic, but it felt a little dull at times. 3.5 stars.

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!

فهرنهايت 451 .. الرواية الكابوس


عالم اليوم :


انظر .. انظر حولك .. هل ما نعيشه حقيقي ؟!! عالم مبني على الخيال، تعبيرات مصطنعة على شكل حبوب، حرب نفسية على شكل إعلانات، كيمياويات لتبديل و تبديد العقل على شكل طعام، ندوات لغسيل المخ على شكل وسائل الإعلام، فقاعات منعزلة بإحكام في شكل وسائل التواصل الإجتماعي، بطولة زائفة في شكل أبطال زائفين، دين جديد في شكل عبادة المال، حرب استنزاف واسعة في شكل تبعية كل ما هو جديد هل ما نعيشه حقيقي ؟ .. لقد أغلقنا الواقع و خلعنا رداء الإنسانية و ألقينا ما تبقى منّا في مقلب قمامة متوسع من الحالة البشرية، العالم الآن مجرد خدعة كبيرة .. أغرقنا بعضنا البعض .. واستنزف التزييف طاقتنا، و اجهدنا التنكر .. نريد أن نكون مخدرين، لأنه من المؤلم ألا نتظاهر .. لأننا جبناء .


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.. و لأنّ الغد هو امتداد طبيعي لليوم، نتيجة شبه حتمية فقد ابدع راي برادوري في وصفه


عالم الغد :



حضارة ما بعد الكتاب .. عالم بدون معرفة .. بدون إحساس .. بدون مشاعر .. بدون دين .. عالم بدون روح !! عالم للأجساد فقط


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“يذكرون في الغالب ماركات الكثير من السيارات أو الملابس أو أسماء المسابح ويقولون ما أروعها! لكنهم يقولون جميعاً الأمور نفسها ولا يقول أحد أمراً مختلفاً عما يقوله أي شخص آخر، وفي معظم الأحيان تكون صناديق النكات في المقاهي مفتوحة وتكرر ذاتها في الغالب. وفي المتاحف كل شيء تجريدي.”


“ذلك القطيع الثرثار من قرود الأشجار التي لا تقول شيئاً، لا تقول شيئاً، وتقول ذلك بصوت عالٍ، عالٍ، عالٍ.”



تخيلوا !! زمنا يعد فيه امتلاك كتاب ما جريمة شنعاء، زمنا أغلقت المدارس و الجامعات لأنّ نسبة المنظمين إليها هي صفر بالمئة، زمنا يضحك فيه الناس على المعرفة، زمنا فيه مجموعة كبيرة جدا من الأجوبة و لكن لا يوجد هنالك أسئلة !! زمنا أصبحت فيه علاقة الأم بإبنها أشبه بعلاقتها بآلة الغسيل، زمنا طلب فيه الموت أكثر من الحياة لا لشيئ سوى أنه تجربة جسدية جديدة، هذا هو زمن هذه الرواية الكابوسية، زمن إحراق الكتب .

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لن أطيل الحديث أكثر .. فالرواية غريبة رائعة .. رغم أن النسخة العربية مشوهة .. و ترجمتها سيئة جدا، تستحق القراءة .

a world without books is my idea of dystopia too

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

This is a book about a dude named Guy. Guy is a fireman in a dystopian future where firemen find houses that have Books in them, burn down said Books, along with the houses and people in them. They do this because books are a threat to television and headphones and evil technology and my god the soullessness of modernity WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. Guy loves his job. Then he meets this girl named Clarissa who might be the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Clarissa has the face of "fragile milk crystal" (I am not making this up) and an incoherent conversation with Guy about the smell of kerosene, jet cars, cows, and grass. Clarissa, now having served her purpose as one of two dickless characters in the book (the other being dude Guy's suicidal wife) gets run over by a truck and promptly dies. Guy is like holy fucking shit-sticks Clarissa HAS OPENED MY EYES: I should read books, not burn them. So he does. (Or at least I think he does? My projectile vomit chunks were obscuring the text.) Anyway so he reads books and tries to tell other people to read books but then The Government is all like WHAT THE FUCK NO and they send a giant robot dog after him, but he escapes into the woods and joins a pack of reading renegades.

I'm not sure what, if anything, happens after that. The most painful thing about reading this book (other than the freakishly bad plot) is that the AUTHOR'S MESSAGE is being rammed so far up your ass on every single page that if you make it to 157, you won't be able to walk for a week.

If this wasn't bad enough, there's the jaw-clenchingly awful overblown prose. Here's an example in which Ray is trying to tell the reader that Guy stopped smiling: "He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness." Dude. Seriously? HE STOPPED SMILING. Get over it. Scarily enough, this is one of the less ragingly horrible examples. The entire book is rife with this kind of thing. Sentences that go on for hours, for days, up a hill, down a hill, and you're so confused and tired by the time you get to the period that you've forgotten what the fuck the whole thing was about in the first place.

Anyway whatever. This book sucked my balls.

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.

Somehow, I have gotten through life as an English major, book geek, and a science-fiction nerd without ever having read this book. I vaguely remember picking it up in high-school and not getting very far with it. It was an interesting premise, but far too depressing for my tastes at the time.

Fast-forward 15 years later. I just bought a copy the other day to register at BookCrossing for their Banned Books Month release challenge. The ALA celebrates Banned Books Week in September, so one BXer challenged us to wild release books that had at one point or another been banned in this country during the entire month. Fahrenheit 451 fits the bill -- an irony that is not lost on anyone, I trust. (Everyone knows Fahrenheit 451 is about the evils of censorship and banning books, right? The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns.)

I didn't intend to start reading it. I really didn't. Somehow it seduced me into it. I glanced at the first page and before I knew it, it was 1:00 in the morning and I was halfway through with the thing. It's really good! No wonder it's a modern classic. Montag's inner emotional and moral journey from a character who burns books gleefully and with a smile on his face to someone who is willing to risk his career, his marriage, his house, and eventually his life for the sake of books is extremely compelling. That this man, product of a culture that devalues reading and values easy, thoughtless entertainments designed to deaden the mind and prevent serious thought, could come to find literature so essential that he would kill for it...! Something about that really spoke to me.

It raises the question: why? What is it about books, about poetry, about literature that is so essential to us? There is no doubt in my mind that it is essential, if not for all individuals (although I find it hard to imagine life without books, I know there are some people who don't read for pleasure, bizarre as that seems to me), then for society. Why should that be? Books don't contain any hard-and-fast answers to all of life's questions. They might contain great philosophical Truths, but only subjectively so -- there will always be someone who will argue and disagree with whatever someone else says. In fact, as Captain Beatty, the evil fire chief, points out, no two books agree with each other. What one says, another contradicts. So what, then, is their allure? What is it that made Mildred's silly friend start to weep when Montag read the poem "Dover Beach" aloud to her? Where does the power of literature come from?

I think the reason that books are so important to our lives and to the health of our society -- of any society -- is not because they give us answers, but because they make us ask the questions. Books -- good books, the books that stay with you for years after you read them, the books that change your view of the world or your way of thinking -- aren't easy. They aren't facile. They aren't about surface; they're about depth. They are, quite literally, thought-provoking. They require complexity of thought. They require effort on the part of the reader. You get out of a book what you put into the reading of it, and therefore books satisfy in a way that other types of entertainment do not.

And they aren't mass-produced. They are individual, unique, gloriously singular. They are each an island, much-needed refuges from an increasingly homogeneous culture.

I'm glad I read Fahrenheit 451, even if the ending was rather bleak. It challenged me and made me think, stimulated me intellectually. We could all do with a bit of intellectual stimulation now and then; it makes life much more fulfilling.