Fahrenheit 451

A stunning piece of literature.
Despite being a well-read lover of science fiction, I never got around to reading Bradbury before. I think because this was commonly known as a high school book, often compared to Orwell, and because I understood and read dystopian books inspired by F451, I figured I'd sufficiently absorbed the story through cultural osmosis, and didn't actually need to read the book.

I now realize that I have done myself a grave disservice for not reading this earlier. While I did indeed know what the jist of it would be, this book really proves that how a story is told can be just as important as the story itself. Bradbury elicits such powerful feelings around the steady changing of the protagonist's mind, that as a reader I felt like I could fully empathize with the whirlwind of emotions he was experiencing. And that ultimately makes all the difference.

One can always just say “yes, books are important, no we shouldn't let government or corporate interests tell us how to think or feel, and yes art and culture has value,” but these values that so many of us hold (Hello Goodreads audience) can sometimes be hard to articulate, because after all wouldn't it be easier to not worry about what's going on in our world, to not have to understand different perspectives. If we had nothing to disagree about, wouldn't that be lovely in a way?

Bradbury really confronts that dissonance, and not with reason so much as with emotion, and that's really what stunned me. Yes, culture is messy, learning is almost always unfairly distributed, and understanding others and disagreeing can all be hard, but what are we without this. Can one feel fulfilled? Or will we lose the very ability to articulate whether or not we're happy or why we feel what we feel?

I fear this book will never lose its relevance, but at least that means there's always a good excuse to read some truly top notch writing.

PS. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Tim Robbins, and he was absolutely spectacular! It was 5.5hrs and finished it in 4 days, so there's another plus: it's short, and good in paper or audio.