Fahrenheit 451

I finished reading this a few days ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is essentially a story about the decline of literacy among humans. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman - except in this future, firemen don't put out fires, they start them. Also in this future, books are illegal. If someone thinks you have books, they call in an alarm on you and the firemen come and burn them, along with pretty much everything else in your house. But don't worry, the actual houses are fireproof - that's how they make them now.

In this future, people don't want to have to think, which is what lead to the banning of books. Instead of living room walls, there are large television screens where people watch short, mindless programs about nothing at all. After all, they don't want to have to think about it too much.

One day, Montag meets a mysterious young girl who has a lot of thoughts and ideas - something that is very unusual. It makes Montag realize that he is not happy in this thoughtless world, and wonders what is in these books that he's spent so many years burning, and might it change his life? So he takes a book home with him from a house that he burned one night.

Chaos ensues. His wife calls in the alarm on her own husband. There is a long chase, but Montag is eventually able to escape the city just in time to see it completely destroyed by a giant bomb dropped on it because a war has just broken out.

It really casts humanity in a dark light. After reading the coda at the end of the book, it's clear that Bradbury had written this book as a warning and he believes that this is the way the world is heading. And sadly, he's sort of right. He wrote about how textbook publishing companies write him to ask if they can publish his work in a textbook, but they censor it so much that he refuses to let them. They want to cut out anything with substance, anything with more than a three-sylable word, every "damn" and "hell" because, heaven forbid we corrupt any of the young minds that might read it. This is all very ironic considering the topic of the book they're trying to censor. Think about it - they want to cut out big chunks of a book about the deliteracy (and yes, I am fully aware that "deliteracy" may not actually be a word - that's ironic too) of humanity. Hmmm...

It makes you think. Of course, if you're reading the book for entertainment purposes, you're not part of the problem. :)