"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury; 6/10 [H]

Read By ???

"Fahrenheit 451: The Temperature At Which Books Burn!"

You know what? Meh. 

YES DAMN YOU! MEH!

The silly all-caps with exclamation pointed "meh" aside, I'll quickly remark that our previous reader "???" made a return here, but this guy was slightly more memorable than the one who read "Rendezvous With Rama" in that I can still remember him years later as having been highly obnoxious. I think I'll just read it in print next time, or get the version read by Bradbury himself.

Fahrenheit 451? We have a single great idea here wrapped in a bunch of (in my opinion) rubbish.  I think the future state censorship and the burning of books, firemen concept, etc, get this up to a 6 on a big stretch, but lordy how unreasonable every single character is.  Motivation? Almost none. Doing anything logically or that real people would ever actually do? Almost never.  Do plot twists even make sense on their own terms? Not so much. 

This book was extraordinarily frustrating to reread, and I was happy when I finished with it (on the drive back from that same expedition to Kentucky) just because it meant it was over.  I still remember yelling at the book -yes, yelling at the book- things like "why is he doing that?," "how is he married to this person?," and (spoiler) "why is there suddenly nuclear war out of nowhere?" So many things just felt completely contrived.

And the writing- oh the adjectives. SO MANY ADJECTIVES! I was discussing Bradbury with my father the other day and he quoted me a line from Voltaire that was something along the lines of "the adjective is the enemy of the noun."  I couldn't have agreed more when I was finished with this book.

The movie, a Truffaut, is an interesting timepiece, though hilariously dated at times. The novel was granted a special "retroactive" Hugo in 2004, an honor only bestowed on two other books, and for which it beat out Clarke's "Childhood's End" and Asimov's "Caves Of Steel," both of which I enjoyed a great deal more.

I am sorry if this review offends you, but I just think this book is so much less than it might have been. I still feel frustrated by the experience of reading it, and I am removed from it by several years.  I will be certain to revisit it in future, perhaps it will benefit from losing the narrator and from not being read in the middle of a bunch of Bradbury, but I doubt it. Even with these circumstances, I think the flaws in this book were numerous, deep, and intrinsic.  6 is probably too high for how I actually felt about this book, but it is the hot item and so forth.

Another thing that annoys the shit out of me with this book is whenever people (the author himself in particular) talk about "Fahrenheit 451" as being profoundly oracular when things happen that are just basic forms of censorship that had been occurring for millenia before Bradbury wrote this novel. Just because people burn A book or a church bans A book or an already repressive country bans A book doesn't mean that there is a modern civilization-wide ban on reading books. Exaggeration in the extreme. Wanna talk about book burnings? See Hitler, Adolf. But he was in the game before Ray Bradbury.