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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading ?
It is quite unnerving to read this book today, Ray Bradbury was spot on with his vision of the future, from the visual aspect it isn't quite as accurate as Orwells 1984 but from a social aspect he couldn't have been more right.Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic novel of a post-literate future, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ stands alongside Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Books have been banned and firemen these days are actually deployed to start the fires in order to burn the outlawed books, Guy Montag runs across a curious young girl named Clarisse McClellan, Clarisse has a queer way of looking at the world...this is because she actually looks at the world, she sees the plants, the stars, the trees and the people whilst everyone else these days just tends to walk around in a haze.
Montags wife lives in such a way that she is almost at the point of social retardation, all she is interested in is watching 'the wall' (basically a big ass TV) and whatever program it is showing, she has no interests in anything else and whilst she seems to have a carefree attitude towards life this is blown out of the water when she takes an overdose, it could be that she was just so vacant that it was accidental but I got the impression that despite outward appearances she was deeply unhappy.
Montag starts questioning his job of burning books and reveals that he has been secretly stashing them away rather than burning them, it doesn't take long before Montags own home has been burned down and he is on the run himself, he discovers an unlikely ally who aids his escape and he winds up meeting up with other like minded people who keep their books in their heads for such a time as society needs them, that time is coming sooner than they could imagine.
In a world where social media has taken over I think the parallels between people of today and Mildred (Montags wife) are uncanny, the thing is that it isn't just social media, it is the news outlets, people form certain ideas and opinions on things (whether it be anything from celebrities to politics) just because an online article tells them to, people blindly follow these days and seem to have lost the ability to form their own opinions or even ask simple questions, that to me is where this book got it so right.
oh a final note Clarisse McClellan was the absolute highlight of this book, I wish that she was in it more.
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