The Book-Burning Review

So. I read Fahrenheit 451 in bits and pieces this time around, which would seem to let me bitch about how I hate when books aren’t divided into smaller chapters within larger sections, but it was really just bad reading planning on my part. I tried to read it while at the FRC Championship last weekend, between bouts of puking last week, and in my campus’s radio station yesterday. Don’t try any of those, especially while with other people because you WILL get frustrated, stalk off by yourself, and have to re-read everything later anyway.

But about this book.

It’s way more plot than character development, which took me a bit to get use to but only because I’ve been sucking up literary fiction and little else for the past five years. Guy Montag is your standard hero who starts out cluelessly following orders to burn books but finds out quickly that they contain the musings of a society that wasn’t dependent on giant TVs and really fast cars for life fulfillment. After talking with Clarisse, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the old more personal ways, he realized there’s more to life and most of it’s stored in the books he’s been so blindly burning so he saves some of those, hatches a knowledge-saving plan with Faber, an old professor he once met, gets in trouble with the law because his vacant wife Mildred calls the firefighters on his literary ass, and runs away with a hobo camp of intellectuals who have been scorned and useless. At the end, a bomb goes off, the city is destroyed, and the hobo intellectuals with their mental maps of books are the only things left. That, and hope for the re-building of the human race, we presume.

This all happens within the space of about three days, story line time-wise. It’s intense, bleak, and fairly interesting around all the descriptions of operatic emotions.

Personal reactions:

• I liked that Ray Bradbury makes it clear that the knowledge inside the books is what’s the most important and that books are just the current handiest way to carry that knowledge. Before teh Internetz and all. But I do think people get all caught up on the actual physical media when it’s the message that counts.
• I know the Walls are suppose to be irredeemably crass and empty-headed distraction, and the Relatives sound screechy enough to kill on first word, but while I was reading about this intense TV I kind of wanted something exactly like that to just zone the fuck out. Not to replace thinking like in this book, but to put it aside and let it chill for an hour or two a day. Maybe that’s why I watch Monday Night Raw with my boyfriend every week.
• The Mechanical Hound was in the book much less than I remember. That fucker was scary  and made a huge impression–in ninth grade honors English, before I had seen American Psycho.
• Oh, PS: American Psycho as the ultimate office-dystopia novel? Maybe.