A Belated Trip Into English Literature: Fahrenheit 451

Welcome to today, class! The pieces of Bradbury's classic are immediately available here and now: flat TVs that take up whole walls, TV programs filled with characters who really do, say, and are nobody in particular. Where children are taught to read, but nothing is ever printed. Where people who are wealthy prey on the poor and don't care about it even if they know about it.

Paper burns at 451 deg Fahrenheit. The protagonist's job is to burn books where he finds them, until he realizes that the current state of affairs is no way to live at all. He turns on the system by degrees, losing his entire way of life and gaining a new one.

Bradbury paints his verbal portraits in bold strokes - mixing words together to get his effect, grammar notwithstanding. At times it comes a bit too quickly - the most momentous moments in the book go by in a blur of a few sentences. He takes quite a bit longer to describe how a character feels at a single given moment.

I loved how he set up the book, and the first half is a really great read. It's intriguing, complicated, and has so many parallels to the media-marinated world Americans live in. The last half has a lot of physical action, and Bradbury leaves too much to the imagination in too many places. It's still cool. A predictable denouement, probably more so because of the post-Bradbury imitators than that Bradbury was predictable. I would have liked the book to be longer because the ending wasn't neat. It is one big loose end that needs attention.

The book isn't long, it goes by quickly, and it has a lot of lessons for us as we travel down the slippery slope of life lit by backlit screens. Read it, and especially make your teenagers read it.

Next: Ulysses (for real. Yeah. But give it a few months, ok? It's super-dense.)