Book #49: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

After reading this book, I feel like I've read it before, even though I was sure I hadn't when I picked it up. It's one of those books that's been on our shelves for years, and one that I've heard about from so many different sources, that I feel like I basically knew what it was about before even picking it up. Basically, this was the dystopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel before the Hunger Games became a thing, but in this future, firemen are sent to burn people's books instead of putting out fires and people spend all of their time isolated and staring at the interactive TV screens. Guy Montag is a fireman, who has always totally enjoyed his job of burning people's books and homes, but one day he meets a young new neighbor girl, who introduces him to other ways of thinking and the potential for living life with other people, and not being afraid. Guy begins to question his job and his life, and he begins to want to read the forbidden books he's spend his life burning--and he suddenly decides to break with his past and rebel against his norms and expectations.

It's a pretty freaky vision of the future, really. Bradbury seems to be predicting people's obsession with screens and social media long before it was ever a thing, based on Millie's character and how all she does is watch TV and talk to the interactive TV characters. It seems a little prescient of him to see that and to have predicted it, because in a small way, that's a lot of what is going on today. The book burning is obviously a much more vivid theme throughout the book though, and more indicative of the problems with this futuristic society. A lot of characters throughout the book also talk about why the books are being burned, and what started it out in the first place, and one thing they say is that they began banning books that offended minority groups, and that snowballed into having basically all books being banned, because everyone could be offended by something in every book. Books were also banned because all the books have different opinions of what is right and wrong, and it was too confusing for people to get such mixed signals from books. Bradbury is clearly warning against the problems of being too PC and too concerned about offending people, instead of writing what holds true for you, yourself. I thought that was a hugely significant commentary for today's society.

I really liked this quote about why books are so important for us as a society today: "It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. . . . Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us" (89-90).