Agora Road Book Club: Fahrenheit 451 edition.

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remember_summer_days

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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

About Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 (Taken from Spark Notes):

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920. By the time he was eleven, he had already begun writing his own stories on butcher paper. His family moved fairly frequently, and he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. He had no further formal education, but he studied on his own at the library and continued to write. For several years, he earned money by selling newspapers on street corners. His first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma," which appeared in 1938 in Imagination!, a magazine for amateur writers. In 1942 he was published in Weird Tales, the legendary pulp science-fiction magazine that fostered such luminaries of the genre as H. P. Lovecraft. Bradbury honed his sci-fi sensibility writing for popular television shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. He also ventured into screenplay writing (he wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1953 film Moby Dick). His book The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, established his reputation as a leading American writer of science fiction.

In the spring of 1950, while living with his family in a humble home in Venice, California, Bradbury began writing what was to become Fahrenheit 451 on pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the University of California at Los Angeles library basement. He finished the first draft, a shorter version called The Fireman, in just nine days. Following in the futuristic-dustpan tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953 and became Bradbury's most popular and widely read work of fiction. He produced a stage version of the novel at the Studio Theatre Playhouse in Los Angeles. The seminal French New Wave director François Truffaut also made a critically acclaimed film adaptation in 1967.

Bradbury has received many awards for his writing and has been honored in numerous ways. Most notably, Apollo astronauts named the Dandelion Crater on the moon after his novel Dandelion Wine. In addition to his novels, screenplays, and scripts for television, Bradbury has written two musicals, co-written two "space-age cantatas," collaborated on an Academy Award–nominated animation short called Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and started his own television series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre. Bradbury, who still lives in California, continues to write and is acknowledged as one of the masters of the science-fiction genre. Although he is recognized primarily for his ideas and sometimes denigrated for his writing style (which some find alternately dry and maudlin), Bradbury nonetheless retains his place among important literary science-fiction talents and visionaries like Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick


Apparently this book is based enough to have been banned! (Taken from Wikipedia costanzayeahrightsmirk)

In Apartheid South Africa the book was burned along with thousands of banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.

In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida, under then-superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier classification system. Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom for "a lot of vulgarity." After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and approved all the currently used books.

In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all "obscene" words blacked out. Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.

In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list.Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.


Also apparently the book is not about censorship!


View: https://youtu.be/uG0xKNE5UQA



'HE SAYS THE CULPRIT in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell's 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as "walls" and its actors as "family," a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.

(...)

Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom's Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were "minorities." He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. Only after people stopped reading did the state employ firemen to burn books.'

Book Club Rules and Schedule.

The only rule is to not discuss anything past the chapter we're on without using the spoiler tag!

Week 1. October 6th to October 13. All of Part 1.

Week 2. October 13 to October 20th. All of part 2

Week 3. October 20th to October 27th. All of Part 3.



What happens if I don't meet the reading deadlines?

Nothing really. You can just read up and catch up and add to the discussion anytime you see fit! Even if you don't feel like catching up by reading the missing pages, you can just hop into sparknotes or something and read the chapter summary in there.

Also just because we are on one part of the book doesn't mean you can't comment of previous chapters.


Vote for your favorite cover!

60th Anniversary Kindle Edition.

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Arabic Edition.

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50th Anniversary Edtion.
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Voyager 2004 Edition.
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Mondadori 1989 Edition.

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Persian Edition.
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MAG Edition (Polish)

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Mass Market 1987 Edition

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المؤسسة العربية الحديثة Edition.
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Kindle 2020 Edition.

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Study resources (I don't know if these are spoiler free or not, so use at your own risk!):

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/451/
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/fahrenheit-451
https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Fahrenheit-451/
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/fahrenheit-451
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/fahrenheit-451/about-fahrenheit-451

Further Reading:

Conversations with Ray Bradbury: https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:168044/datastream/PDF/view
Bradbury Misinterpreted: https://www.laweekly.com/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/
Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. https://www.ysk-books.com/app/books/Ray%20Bradbury's%20Fahrenheit%20451%20(Bloom's%20Modern%20Critical%20Interpretations).pdf#page=40
IMPEDIMENT TO KNOWLEDGE AND IMAGINATION IN RAY BRADBURY'S DYSTOPIAN NOVEL, FAHRENHEIT 451 https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/dtcfdergisi/issue/66791/1048570

Have a comfy reading!

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All I will say is that the Mondadori 1989 Edition and Kindle 2020 Edition covers look very unispired IMO.
 

№56

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The bio you included doesn't mention that Bradbury died in 2012.
It's been a long time since I read F451, but I don't remember liking it as much as the Martian Chronicles. Maybe it will make more sense now that I'm old enough to understand that we live in a society.
The obsession American schools and libraries have with inoffensive "banned books" is comically stupid. They're never actually books the state doesn't want you to read, they're mainstream books somebody complained about once or that were outlawed in a different country. This isn't a criticism of F451, but the fact that it's on one of those "banned books week" lists means next to nothing.
 
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This is my first time participating in a group such as this, so I'm not really sure what types of discourse is expected. This is my first read-through of the F451, and I'm up to page 28, which is about halfway through the first part. I'll include my thoughts as follows:

Before reading, I did get a quick glance at the history of the author, and of the commentary and themes presented in the book. I would thus like to sum up my pre-reading knowledge of the book by bringing up the philosophy of Kant. More specifically, I would like to relate this to his writing on enlightenment, which @Thermite recently posted a status about which I read (mostly). The book presents a dystopian future, although I read that its not supposed to be a critique of government, but instead proposes an ignorant society caused by the way human nature develops. This relates to Kant's view of having a few "intellectuals" who can challenge others beliefs and allow them to become 'enlightened'. We see this in the book with Clarisse, whom I will bring up again later.
I also think that it's a particularly good first choice for Agora. It reflects many of the themes which I see discussed on here all the time, and also reinforces some of my beliefs which I have posted about --at least, as well as I can explain them, seeing as they are still only half-formed thoughts, at the moment. It reminds me of that one blurb from 1984, about how you can read something that you've known to be true but never vocalized or finalized in thought.

A major aspect of the story so far involves 'hedonism', although that is somewhat of a catch-all term, and could be used to describe all sorts of different things. I'm sure that there's a more specific word to describe what I'm talking about here, but I'm not sure what to call it for now. It's something I've thought about before, but have never decided on a good name for it. Is "Bradbury hedonism" a good placeholder for now? That's what I'll be referring to it as for now.
Basically, we see it through Montag's supposed enjoyment of burning books, although it is quickly question as to whether or not he really enjoys it. When faced with silence, and being able to see things from a different perspective, he quickly becomes disillusioned with the act. Still, he acts as if he does, anyways.

"You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you."

"I am very much in love!" He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but there was no face. "I am !"

You can see this all the time, even now on say, Twitter. Discussion and thoughts are heavily discouraged, with people preferring to only ever reply to others with reaction images. Just try and find someone on that site trying to seriously discuss their beliefs with someone else, and you will see plenty of replies of whatever FOTM meme image people are circulating around at the time. See the LowTierGod one as an example. It's a meme, but its use isn't to be funny. People post it because it's an easy way to avoid actually having to confront others about their beliefs using their own thoughts. They let the image do the talking for them. This once again relates to Kant's enlightenment, as he mentions how 'guardians' serve the role of keeping people unenlightened, as they are depended on their guardians and get all of their beliefs from them, without ever actually doing much thinking for themselves. These types of images fulfill the role of a guardian. There exists an implied humor when someone uses them, but the real motivations behind the post are habit and discomfort.

To bring Kant up one more time, I would like to now mention Clarisse. Kant uses terms of maturity to explain mental/philosophical enlightenment; he uses the term 'minor', not to refer to someone as a child in a literal sense, but as a child in a sense that they still rely on someone else to handle their beliefs and lifestyle, much like how a child relies on a parent. Adulthood, then, is independence of thought.

"Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always used to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid."

Continuing on with Bradbury hedonism, it relates again to the internet.

"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rosegarden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"

I've seen this mindset in myself, and, as a zoomer, I would like to believe that I'm not alone in that boat.
There are so many websites you can access via the webring here, or by browsing Neocities, yet I rarely show the willpower necessary to engage with them on any level other than the superficial.
I see a cool website. I 'appreciate' --if you can really call it that-- its design and the effort put into it for a few seconds. I look at a few of the different pages it offers, though I never take the time to explore it in depth. If I see a large page with a lot of text, I may read a couple of the first paragraphs, and then perhaps I scan through the last couple, as well. However, I never get any real understanding from it. I gain only the ability say that I know it exists. I have no grounds to call myself an expert on anything, as I am enlightened in nothing.
This phenomenon applies to writing just as much, even not mire so, than reading, too. I'm quite disappointed with what I have in this post so far. I had so many things I noticed while reading (like the scene with the doctors, or with the mechanical dog), yet I have not the willpower to communicate them. As for what I have tried to say, I have not stated them at all with the depth I thought I knew about them.

It's easy to say that these things apply to our current decade's society, and perhaps it can even be said that it is "more relevant then ever". Then again, this book was written in the 1950s, and it was most definitely relevant during that period, as well. Who is to say at which period over the other was this book more relevant? I noticed something similar when I read 1984, as well. If there's one point I would like to focus on to stir the discussion ITT, it would be the reason why all of these books are so often brought up in discussion, even now, and whether the comparisons really warranted.

One last thing I would like to mention as I try to bring as many of the thoughts I have managed to hold on to while writing this is the writing style. of this book.
It uses quite a lot of similes and metaphors, many of which go over my head.
Take this excerpt, for example:

"The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun."

I'm pretty sure that this is supposed to reveal some deeper trait about Clarisse's character, but I really cannot put my finger on what is actually trying to say.
In any case, I would also like to bring up symbolism.
Obviously, fire is brought up a lot, and temperature-related language is often thrown in, as well. Despite that, the setting of the start of the book heavily focuses on rain and the moon, as opposed to the sun. I think this might be trying to say something about how the true 'nature' of earth, which can be seen only if one slows down to take the time and analyze it, is completely opposed to the lifestyle of fire, which is hot, quick, and all over the place.
Another thing I noticed was the multiple images of the salamander. IIRC, the Greeks believed that salamanders were born from flames, as when wood is set on fire, they would come out of it. In truth, the salamanders had been there the whole time, and were in fact running away from the flames, though the Greeks misinterpreted this. This relates to Montag, as he, as a salamander, is misinterpreted (by himself) to enjoy the burning of books, though his enjoyment of it is entirely superficial.
 
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Insect

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I read this book around January. I don't remember where part 1 ends off, but I'll try to keep my discussion around the beginning of the book.

One of the things I remember noticing first was the way the setting of the book is described to the reader. Ray Bradbury designed the entire setting to revolve around the idea he wanted to express, which is helpful for conveying the theme but doesn't make the world feel genuine at all. I kind of wished the setting were a bit more in-depth and interesting, with more thought and detail put into the idea of a stagnating culture. As it is, all that is present is the bare-bones idea of an eerie, dystopian society, without any of the actual society part. Aside from the firemen, we don't actually get a good idea of what work or daily life looks like for the people in this book, other than fast cars and apathy.

Something I immediatly enjoyed, however, was the descriptive language Ray Bradbury uses.
It uses quite a lot of similies and metaphors, many of which go over my head.
Take this excerpt, for example:

"The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun."

I'm pretty sure thst this is supposed to reveal some deeper trait about Clarisse's character, but I really cannot put my finger on what is actually trying to say.
This passage is actually a really good example. In this case, he uses what is almost like "reverse-personification," where he uses an object to describe a person. If you could imagine a girl's face as a clock in a dark room in the middle of the night, then you could almost imagine the kind of facial expression and disposition the face would have. It's like using metaphors in a way that doesn't make logical sense, but paints an image that your brain can relate with. This passage and some other ones, I think one was describing a sunrise and another was describing his wife's face after she OD'd, were my favorite parts of the book.

One part I was suprised by was the idea of people driving recklessly. I see this a lot today, where people drive excessively over the speed limit and/or ride motorcycles without helmets (I live in MI, it's legal here). These days people have gotten much more aggressive and don't seem to care as much. While this is mostly anecdotal, here is data I found about the increase in driving fatalities:
I don't know if this alone is a trustworthy source, but it is somewhat concerning in the context of Farenheit 451's themes.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
 
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This passage is actually a really good example. In this case, he uses what is almost like "reverse-personification," where he uses an object to describe a person. If you could imagine a girl's face as a clock in a dark room in the middle of the night, then you could almost imagine the kind of facial expression and disposition the face would have. It's like using metaphors in a way that doesn't make logical sense, but paints an image that your brain can relate with. This passage and some other ones, I think one was describing a sunrise and another was describing his wife's face after she OD'd, were my favorite parts of the book.
He does both this and its opposite, as well. From the span of about pages 30-38, he goes into quite some detail about the act of book burning. Books are comparable to birds, and the act of burning them is written as if it is no different than killing or hunting masses of animals. It does result in some nice imagery, although not written in a way that's exactly gripping. I'm not super into analyzing metaphors, though I will admit its not as bad as I may have described it as in my first post.

The real issue I'm having with the rhetorical writing at the moment is the transitions. I'm finding it difficult to really discern when one idea is flowing to another, and if sentences are being used to describe the previous idea or are trying to present a new one. I suppose that that could just be because I'm reading too fast, though. I find, just as you said, that its difficult to really view imagine the scope of the world presented, since complex metaphors are used to describe some things, while others are just glossed over.
 

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Sorry I don't really have that much to say for this one. There's another book I read as a kid called "I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President" that honestly summarized my thoughts so perfectly that I don't know what I could add to it.
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Read part one. Cant say it was enjoyable, or rather i guess i should say it was enjoyable in the very way the book is trying to highlight as meaningless, like television or something, except for there are many cinematic series that i can dig into a bit more than this short novel. It is certainly an idea driven novel. And those ideas feel like they have been shoved down my throat my whole life(Im 42). Bradbury seems unconcerned with prose and even his character development is idea driven and thus one dimensional. At times the adjectives he chooses can be so unbearably cringe that it makes me want to like the novel more. I guess thats good? I dont really know. Having said this i like to look for things in books that interest me so I am gonna take a short swim in Bradbury's sea. Very short.

The most interesting part, to me, is how one of the ideas repeated in Part One is that the people in books are not real. When Beatty explains it to Montag he even goes so far as to explain that even when a book refers to real people the people in the book are just ethereal versions of them. This idea strikes me as interesting because it is, indeed, true that they are ethereal. Still, the conclusion that these characters are not important because of their imagined reality outside the material world is faulty. This is one of the books intended themes i believe, the battle between the mythical and the material.

However, given the authors(Bradbury) creation of a mythos based purely on the material world destroying the mythical world by destroying physical material there seems to be an implication that the material world has a significant means of control over the mythical world. It will be interesting to see how and if this dynamic plays out in the next 100 pages.
 
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remember_summer_days

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So happy to read so many smart replies! You guys are amazing! :agpepsi: :agnoedge:

>Blood Meridian died for this.

So yeah like most people who have already posted I don't have a hot takes or public relations 'but you did a good job' sort of things to say. The novel hasn't been amazing so far and calling it good would be an insult for it would be justifying it's mediocrity.

First the prose. Sometimes it rocks hard with the energy of a classic night-core remix. Yes that is a good thing.

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

Holy crap this is so metal. Bradbury can write with a fire that burns his words into your mind like the smell of BBQ pork, you can't wait to delight in its fat and its meat. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a lot of meat to this pork, rather it just smells good but when you take a bite there's not a lot of substance and instead just some cliched Walmart's Great-Value BBQ sauce that attempts to give flavor but I mean chef I wanted to taste some of that delicious pork and not a liter of synthetic tomatoes with God knows what else. And that is a lot of sauce. The descriptive power that Bradbury employs with the weapon of his paragraphs is immediately ruined when every paragraph feels like it's trying to narrate some sublime and life-changing epic to its reader. Instead of striking your senses it just becomes dull.

Bradbury has been criticized for using flowery prose, and at least on this novel. Oh boi does it shows.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but – what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle.

Its not that this doesn't read beautifully. Its that its matter of words come off as comical for what's being said. In her collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor once cautioned against writers who were afraid to get dusty.

'(...) This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.'

Fahrenheit 451 reads like a novel really afraid to get any sort of dust on it, and the result is boredom and an attack to the work's own potential. Yet Bradbury's style remains highly effective when it needs to be, we are clearly in presence of great talent when it comes to composition. Just don't add so much sauce all the time.

Speaking about flowery stuff, let's talk about Clarisse.

Clarisse reads like one of those co-protagonist from those high-concept-but-mostly-nothing-else coming of age anime. You know the sort of girl that pops into the protagonist's life and changes his life around with the power of love and smiles. Coincidentally I'm reading a yuri light novel with a heroine whose name is also Clarisse and while reviewing my notes, I kid you not, I had to check if I was reading F451 or the light novel. Clarisse can change your life around with 3 simpel words.

'Are you happy?'

That is all it took for Montag to come to Christ.

This sort of characterization is so weak that its the stuff that will get you to repeat a course on writing school. It's so bare-bones and cliche and juvenile, honestly just cringe. No I don't believe someone who has been burning books for about a decade will change his life around because he met with a cute and quirky and crazy 17 year old adolescent. That is the stuff of fantasy. Clarisse doesn't read anymore interesting than the protagonist of Divergent or Hunger Games.

And it's obvious what the author wants to do with Clarrise. She and her family, to quote Rhodes, are these sort of enlightened individuals who are too misunderstood by the stupidity of the society that surrounds them. Which is another very YA concept. Not that being obvious is a bad thing, but Clarisse and the way she's presented feels pamphletary.

As does the world of the novel. Maybe its just a trope of dystopian fiction that the world building is this poor. Maybe I've been spoiled by 21st century's autistic fan-wikis with mines of world building to explore, but the world of Fahrenheit451, for it's most part, just doesn't feel real. Again, maybe this gets better in the later chapters, but there is so little exploration about what it means to live in this society than 'books bad, people who watch tv and burn books bad'. While the novel instead tells us 'Books good, people who read book good'.

I think the main issue with this novel, if I could somehow condensed it, is that this novel is about an idea and not about people. I call that propaganda. And you know propaganda isn't always bad. But I wouldn't call propaganda literature. I feel like there are is very few humanity being explored in this novel, that it would've served it better if it had been written down as an essay instead, because despite everything it has some interesting ideas to tell.

Gonna do a Foster Wallace and admit that, often, the most important truths are those we cannot hear without rolling our eyes. Yes a society based around hedonistic consumption of entertainment is bad. Yes phone and TV bad. Yes books probably better than TV. The idea of characters installing huge TV's all over their houses and calling the characters in them 'family' is some eery 1950's proto-waifuism.

Sadly many of Bradbury's great ideas are dragged down in the novel by how self-congratulatory it all seems. Like: Hey you! Yes you reading this book! Aren't you just so smart and special, like Clarisse, for reading books instead of watching TV or listening to a radio like all of those other peasants! Yes you are! Yes you are! Here! Take some prose-candy!' The images, though they can strike you powerfully, can feel quite absurd. Like the image of the 'heretic reader' being burned at the stake for reading. Or equating book reading with some enlightened craziness.

But yes, I applaud how passionate Bradbury is about defending the dignity of lecture, unironically. The repeated image of books as white birds, almost as angels, is really effective. Which makes me sad that the depiction of those who oppose books has been so one sided.

'The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now.'

The villain of this novel sounds a lot like my dad. But you know my dad sort of had a point. I'm not one to believe that ideas don't hurt people. That the fact that some ideas are propagated by books hurt a good amount of people in very real ways. Ideas are dangerous. And we gotta deal with it. I wish the novel acknowledge more the nuances of this issue, that free speech does hurt and that books can be dangerous. Was the soft book burning the allies did against Nazi propaganda after WW2 a good or a bad thing? Is supporting the distribution of books that call for violence, or for implementations of regimes that limit free speech a good thing? Should we allow books that teach people to hate minorities, to build bombs, to find child porn, that call for people to kill themselves...

Now these are very complicated questions, and of course I'm on agoraroad so I lean on the side of free speech and freedom of thought, but I do not think this is a one sided issues, and the lack of nuance the novel has in discussing such a complicated topic works against the novel's integrity. It cannot be reduced to 'Books make people sad'!

And honestly it's also such a missed opportunity for characterization. Imagine if Montag had concrete motivations for why he enjoys book burning. You know something real and human that won't crumble when a teenager asks him are u happy. And imagine he developed a father-daugther relationship with Clarisse and then they could have an interesting debate about it or something.

Characterization is not this work's strong suit. We've all agreed on that. But Bradbury's ideas are.

''Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.'

The fact that Bradbury predicted how mass immigration would lead to political censorship back in the 1950s is outright visionary (This doesn't mean that we should be against mass immigration, but it does mean that we have to consider one of its dangers and how to address that trouble ). The same goes for the idea of people becoming so obsessed with fiction that they call TV characters family.

Yet I also feel that the depiction of TV feels a bit one-sided. Especially with modern entertainment. But this opens another can of worms that I will just outline and not discuss. Can something like Breaking Bad or The Wire be called high art? Haven't we agreed that Scorcesse and Tarkovsky is great art? Shouldn't people have the right to obsesses over these works? You know just how some authors like Kakfa called Dostoevsky family because of his novels. The trouble I fear, is that many of the criticism that can be aimed at the supposed excesses of TV can also be aimed at books.

I'll also say, it may be that a lot of the cliched and tired nature of the themes of this novel originates from some sort of inverse cultural osmosis. Like how zoomers find Seinfield boring and cliche because they've seen the tropes presented in the show already done to death, while often ignoring that Seinfield originated those tropes they are so bored of. I'm not good enough of a literary scholar to say how revolutionary Bradbury's ideas were on a novel for the time when it came out. But regardless, this wouldn't excuse the mediocre delivery.

The last two things that I'll add are the ideas that this ultra-hedonistic society also only has abstract art outside TV and it's also really violent. Now I find the idea that hedoinism leads to abstract art to be something to ponder about. But I'll save those reflections for another day. I think I've written enough xD
 
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Also, I forgot to add that apparently Bradbury wrote this novel in 9 days. If we go by the metric of what you can get done in 9 days, then this would be a masterpiece lol.
 
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@Remember_Summer_Days
Your criticisms of the book are a better summation of the issues that I think many of the readers, myself included, could ever adequately put into words.

Knowing that the book was written in nine days changes my perspective on things quite a bit. I was having difficulty trying to find a deeper connected meaning in Bradbury's metaphors, but considering that time limit imposed on the writing, I think now that it seems safer to view much of this book as just ramblings to fill space. Much of the transitory aspect I mention earlier can also be explained due to this, as the book jumps from one scene to the next in a fashion similar to a 3-am overworked mind trying to cram as many words as possible onto the page. Fitting, I suppose, considering the book's commentary on continuous streams of information and trying to live life in the fast lane. It also gives us excerpts such as this one:

"When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom ... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either ... never ... quite . . . touched . . . anything."

Should we really be more lenient in our judgements of the book, knowing that to be the case? I think that delving into the nuances of that topic is where the discussion should be vectored, at the moment. It's similar to the Seinfeld effect, which you happened to mention; should be forgive a work, if we happen to see it as bland or clichéd, if it was what originated those tropes in the first place? After all, is it not likely that the only reason we see it as clichéd in the first place is because we are more interested in engaging with more recent works, whose creators have had the expressed purpose of trying to differentiate themselves from the original? After all, boredom and a development of cringe are some of the primary reasons why people so readily jump onto whatever >subversive masterpiececostanzayeahrightsmirk comes out next.

I'm feeling a similar phenomenon from this book, and works like it. Bradbury's intent was obviously to present his thoughts and ideas about the future. Since the book was written in 9 days, many of those thoughts were still only half-formed when he put them on the page. Perhaps, as you said, it would have been better as an essay. The same could be said for 1984. Would they still have reached as many people as they did, had that have been the case? Would the essay versions continue to perpetrate discussions of dystopias, as the novels do even now, such as in boomer Facebook groups?

Bradbury was a writer for quite so time, so I imagine that he enjoyed doing it. Would he still have put down his ideas, as they were presented, if he did not have the opportunity to put them into as flowery prose as he wrote with in Fahrenheit 451? It's possible to imagine a scenario in which he spent much greater effort, perhaps via years of editing, to put greater meaning into each of the books passages. During that time, would a great deal of things, such as "never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom" be lost? If his purpose was to present the ideas, and reading the book implants even but the first inklings of contemplating those ideas ourselves, does it not succeed at what it's trying to do? I think a more detailed and refined book would implant similar thoughts, sure, though the semantics would never be the same.

As I said, its easy to entertain the thought of the platonic "ideal" version of a book. You can criticize a work for not ever living up to that shape. I wonder if that is only due to some aspect of the intellectual sphere which creates that standard, and whether it is truly warranted. I don't know, maybe it is. I'm aware that there is this concept in eastern philosophy of accepting something for its imperfections, while acknowledging also its ideal form. I've seen it used to explain why Japanese media, such as anime or VNs, rely so heavily on tropes --it's because imperfections will always exist, thus its best to not only allow but also flourish in them, and to instead focus on allowing the work to present its ideas by interweaving them into those clichés (I'll expand on this in much greater detail if and when we discuss AIR). I mention this because I felt a similar cringe, as you had described, towards Clarisse's character. I wonder, though, if the reason why that standard exists is only because of how many YA novels we have been exposed to in the past couple decades. A few hundred years ago, for example, debates on maturity and how a young man or women can be considered wiser than their elders were at the forefront of philosophical discussion.


In any case, you really hit the nail on the head. great write-up:CoolKong:
 
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@Remember_Summer_Days
Your criticisms of the book are a better summation of the issues that I think many of the readers, myself included, could ever adequately put into words.

Knowing that the book was written in nine days changes my perspective on things quite a bit. I was having difficulty trying to find a deeper connected meaning in Bradbury's metaphors, but considering that time limit imposed on the writing, I think now that it seems safer to view much of this book as just ramblings to fill space. Much of the transitory aspect I mention earlier can also be explained due to this, as the book jumps from one scene to the next in a fashion similar to a 3-am overworked mind trying to cram as many words as possible onto the page. Fitting, I suppose, considering the book's commentary on continuous streams of information and trying to live life in the fast lane. It also gives us excerpts such as this one:

"When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom ... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either ... never ... quite . . . touched . . . anything."

Should we really be more lenient in our judgements of the book, knowing that to be the case? I think that delving into the nuances of that topic is where the discussion should be vectored, at the moment. It's similar to the Seinfeld effect, which you happened to mention; should be forgive a work, if we happen to see it as bland or clichéd, if it was what originated those tropes in the first place? After all, is it not likely that the only reason we see it as clichéd in the first place is because we are more interested in engaging with more recent works, whose creators have had the expressed purpose of trying to differentiate themselves from the original? After all, boredom and a development of cringe are some of the primary reasons why people so readily jump onto whatever >subversive masterpiececostanzayeahrightsmirk comes out next.

I'm feeling a similar phenomenon from this book, and works like it. Bradbury's intent was obviously to present his thoughts and ideas about the future. Since the book was written in 9 days, many of those thoughts were still only half-formed when he put them on the page. Perhaps, as you said, it would have been better as an essay. The same could be said for 1984. Would they still have reached as many people as they did, had that have been the case? Would the essay versions continue to perpetrate discussions of dystopias, as the novels do even now, such as in boomer Facebook groups?

Bradbury was a writer for quite so time, so I imagine that he enjoyed doing it. Would he still have put down his ideas, as they were presented, if he did not have the opportunity to put them into as flowery prose as he wrote with in Fahrenheit 451? It's possible to imagine a scenario in which he spent much greater effort, perhaps via years of editing, to put greater meaning into each of the books passages. During that time, would a great deal of things, such as "never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom" be lost? If his purpose was to present the ideas, and reading the book implants even but the first inklings of contemplating those ideas ourselves, does it not succeed at what it's trying to do? I think a more detailed and refined book would implant similar thoughts, sure, though the semantics would never be the same.

As I said, its easy to entertain the thought of the platonic "ideal" version of a book. You can criticize a work for not ever living up to that shape. I wonder if that is only due to some aspect of the intellectual sphere which creates that standard, and whether it is truly warranted. I don't know, maybe it is. I'm aware that there is this concept in eastern philosophy of accepting something for its imperfections, while acknowledging also its ideal form. I've seen it used to explain why Japanese media, such as anime or VNs, rely so heavily on tropes --it's because imperfections will always exist, thus its best to not only allow but also flourish in them, and to instead focus on allowing the work to present its ideas by interweaving them into those clichés (I'll expand on this in much greater detail if and when we discuss AIR). I mention this because I felt a similar cringe, as you had described, towards Clarisse's character. I wonder, though, if the reason why that standard exists is only because of how many YA novels we have been exposed to in the past couple decades. A few hundred years ago, for example, debates on maturity and how a young man or women can be considered wiser than their elders were at the forefront of philosophical discussion.


In any case, you really hit the nail on the head. great write-up:CoolKong:
I think it's fair to be skeptical of the idea of boredom and cliché as evidence against the strength of a literary work. I feel like taking away point from a work because it feels boring or cliched to you is some sort of meta-criticism and I usually don't let those fly-by. However I think it's fair to call Fahrenheit451 bland, so far. Bland characterization, bland world-building, bland exposition of ideas. And there is a difference between blandness, lack of substance, from boredom. I do love my nonsense and cliched yuri, those are very fun for me to read, but those sort of works I enjoy lack any sort of depth about, well, anything.

So I definitely agree with you that my criticisms of cliche and boredom might be dismissed as a personal opinion. And I further agree that the opposite, novelty and subversion for the sake of not being boring or cliche, is as much of a meaningless thing when it comes to literary criticism. Though I think a good amount of Yale-educated college critics would disagree with us haha. But honestly I'd rather swallow some tired cliche than another experimental subversion. At least with the cliché I know what I'm in for. Not to mention that authors since the 90s have noted that subversion itself has become a cliché.

I doubt that if these sort of boomer dystopias were realized into essays they would've had their current cultural impact. I think you're also a christian. Have you seen the Kendrick's brothers movies? Like Fireproof or Courageous, the sort of movies church youth group used to play when there were christian pizza parties. Personally I quite enjoy those movies, they leave me with a cozy, suburban-spirituality feeling. But they really are more of a visual sermon than a movie. I wouldn't call Kendrick brother's movies good 'cinema' the same way I wouldn't call F451 (So far) good literature. It might be a good book and a good story, but not good literature. Hopefully that makes sense.

An artist can accomplish his artistic vision with a novel, but if that vision was flawed from the start, it probably won't make for good literature. And I think the moral or intellectual worth of an artistic vision doesn't necessarily equate with a good piece of art. Bradbury might've succeeded at his artistic and/or ideological intent with 1984, but that doesn't mean it's good literature qua literature.

The idea of standards is a really interesting question though. And I've had discussions about this also on the topic of anime. To give an example the people who adore Urobochi's scripts like Fate/Zero or Madoka and call those two works of animation masterpieces. Well I think those don't hold any water to the depths some literature have produced, heck even other tv shows have produced. Yet in the context of anime, Madoka and Fate/Zero do seem to be of extraordinary depth, when compared to most other anime. This begs the question, if we lived in an alternative reality where, for whatever reason, anime was the only form of art available to us, and all anime was the same as it is in the real world... Then we might not be able to argue that Madoka and Fate/Zero are not masterpieces, for there is nothing better than those two.

Yet I'm skeptical about this sort of reasoning because we can clearly apprehend the possibility of some platonic perfect work of art. Now some disagree that our platonic intuitions about abstract objects mean anything. But at that point we would be debating metaphysics.

But maybe this is all a conversation about semantics. Maybe the term good or bad, when applied to art, is a relative thing for us humans, since we tend to judge by standards of what have been actualized in our material reality. Mozart might sound like trashy auto-tune to angels in the 24/7 presence of God. But then if that were truly the case, and it might be not, we could just say that Mozart's music is objectively bad but for us humans it just happens to sound fine as fuck. We just have no way of knowing.

But I don't think we ought to resort to skepticism about our artistic intuitions unless given evidence otherwise. Unless we are given to evidence that Mozart is a very low sort of music compared to the music angels produce, then we can say Mozart is objectively good. Or we could just be more moderate and say that Mozart is objectively good for human standards, whatever value those standards have.

Personally I'm inclined to think that probably the art humans produce is not that great when compared to the ideal of what God could create as a piece of art. Yet objective greatness is not always the most important thing in life or in art for humans. At the end of the day I believe that a work made with sincere love and that touches a bunch of people and helps them change for the better, is better for the soul of everyone that some excellent piece of art conjured by pride and sadness and that has the effect of destroying the soul of the artist and those who interact with the piece of art. Even if that piece of art ends up being objectively better.

What I'm trying to say is, goodness and artistic value won't necessarily correlate imo, though we humans tend to value works that posses both attributes.

I can't comment on eastern philosophy, but if humans are meant to be perfected, then it makes sense for them to seek to perfect what they do, to live for an aesthetic ideal, be it God or not (Nietzche bros sorry). And then it follows that we should concern ourselves with diminishing what's not living up to those standards. Now that's an abstract value. You can always comment on how that mindset is destructive but.

1.Assuming that what's true correlates with human well-being.
2. There's always healthy ways of going about pursuing aesthetic ideals. But that´s a conversation for psychology.

So I don't think that indulging oneself or one's work to flourish in imperfections is to be pursued.

As with anime tropes, I don't even think tropes are a bad thing in itself, so I don't necessarily think that using tropey characters is an imperfection. The issue with tropes is that they are often used as an excuse for lazy writing. Though I appreciate the imagination of contemplating a piece of art that flourishes because it thinks it's imperfections make it better. Now that would be something beautiful to see. But what corresponds in the art form might not correspond to reality. Even if that corresponding is a commentary on the philosophy of art. We must remember all art in an exercise of imagination, and we can quite easily imagine things that are not true.

I'm probably getting too abstract so apologies for that. But what can I say but autism.

As for Clarisse, I imagine that if I never had any exposure to cringe YA novels or fanfics I wouldn't feel cringe for her character. However I would still, I imagine, feel that she lacks any real substance.

Thanks for making me think about this sort of stuff! This is all really complicated and there's much I don't know and so much I have to learn about, well everything. But on this instance about art. I could be wrong about most of what I've written really. So I'm trying to learn as best as I can from other's opinions.
I really appreciate your thoughtful comments! :NepWink:
 
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I read this book around January. I don't remember where part 1 ends off, but I'll try to keep my discussion around the beginning of the book.

One of the things I remember noticing first was the way the setting of the book is described to the reader. Ray Bradbury designed the entire setting to revolve around the idea he wanted to express, which is helpful for conveying the theme but doesn't make the world feel genuine at all. I kind of wished the setting were a bit more in-depth and interesting, with more thought and detail put into the idea of a stagnating culture. As it is, all that is present is the bare-bones idea of an eerie, dystopian society, without any of the actual society part. Aside from the firemen, we don't actually get a good idea of what work or daily life looks like for the people in this book, other than fast cars and apathy.

Something I immediatly enjoyed, however, was the descriptive language Ray Bradbury uses.

This passage is actually a really good example. In this case, he uses what is almost like "reverse-personification," where he uses an object to describe a person. If you could imagine a girl's face as a clock in a dark room in the middle of the night, then you could almost imagine the kind of facial expression and disposition the face would have. It's like using metaphors in a way that doesn't make logical sense, but paints an image that your brain can relate with. This passage and some other ones, I think one was describing a sunrise and another was describing his wife's face after she OD'd, were my favorite parts of the book.

One part I was suprised by was the idea of people driving recklessly. I see this a lot today, where people drive excessively over the speed limit and/or ride motorcycles without helmets (I live in MI, it's legal here). These days people have gotten much more aggressive and don't seem to care as much. While this is mostly anecdotal, here is data I found about the increase in driving fatalities:
I don't know if this alone is a trustworthy source, but it is somewhat concerning in the context of Farenheit 451's themes.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Bradbury definitely hit the nail on the head about people going so fast and being so violent. Perhaps they are so violent because they have to go so fast. Hurrying up implies you've got no time to reflect in order to solve issues and the easiest way to solve issues without thinking is to use force. I think books, no matter the quality or the genre, forces us to be still, keep quiet and think, even if in a menial way. It makes us be quiet for a while. And quietness is a value pretty much missing from modern culture.

As for some of metaphors Bradbury utilizes... This might just be our brains not working the same honestly. Like for the example of the reverse-personification clock faced girl metaphor my brain just goes :ConfusedKaguya:. Like it's not like imagist poetry where the juxtaposition of two images creates a new one, many of Bradbury' metaphors, feel to me, like two images that just don't add to anything more together, even if they read beautifully.
 
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Finished Part 1 the other day. I didn't want to look at the thread until I finished the reading, and now it looks like I'm going to be echoing what other people have said already.
Bradbury's claim that the book has "nothing to do with censorship" is accurate. F451 is set in an exaggerated version of the modern world, where the average citizen is so absorbed in fast-paced pop culture that they lose interest in any activity that's slow-paced or deliberate. This loss of interest grows into a sense of anxiety, and eventually resentment towards these activities that were part of everyone's life up until a couple years ago when they suddenly became "irrelevant." The modern person feels like they're missing out on something and lashes out because they're afraid of admitting it. Andrew Tate, social media addict and the product of a public school system that reduces literature to a multiple-choice test, bashes reading as a "low return-on-investment activity." Kids who've spend their entire lives in the city blog about how taking a walk in the woods makes you a fascist. The rootless bureaucrats at the Smithsonian create a chart that describes the nuclear family as inherently white (black people don't have families), and therefore racist and oppressive. Some cretin on Twitter makes a 10-post thread about how the Iliad and Odyssey are old-fashioned versions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We see this attitude right from the first page of F451, where Montag sprays his kerosene to "bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history." Captain Beatty's "bad guy speech" near the end of Part 1 makes this even more obvious. The firemen don't care about suppressing the content of the books, they burn them because they fear a past that threatens the legitimacy of their present.
Bradbury is 100% correct in his diagnosis, but as other people in this thread have said, he has a limited understanding of the problem and does a really bad job of expressing it in his story. In his explanation of why this change in society came about there are two clearly-defined groups of people - the sensitive nerds (Clarisse, her family, and eventually Montag) whose attraction to old-fashioned things is treated like a superpower, and the braindead normies (everyone else, but Mildred most of all) who are incapable of understanding the nerds and hate them because of how sensitive and intelligent they are. The normies took over because there were more of them, and now the nerds have to live in hiding. I shouldn't have to explain how stupid this all is. Apparently Bradbury can't conceive of a person who has an interest in books and old-fashioned things but constantly struggles with the distractions of modern life. He doesn't really think a "normie" can change their mind about the world, it's clear right from the start that Montag is going to resist society and that Mildred isn't from the one-dimensional way they're written. You're either in one category or the other. Not only does Bradbury refuse to flesh out his setting by never giving the dystopia a chance to make a case for itself (Beatty's speech is incredibly awkward, and reads like he doesn't actually believe what he's saying despite being portrayed as an unambiguous bad guy), but he also refuses to treat the people who have been conned by this society with any kind of sympathy.
This aspect is where my attitude towards the book goes from ambivalence to outright dislike. A dystopian story that treats the average citizens of the dystopia as hopeless sheep is inherently toothless and self-congratulatory. You, the reader, are made to believe that you're smarter than these characters and should feel secure in the fact that you will never make the same mistakes as they do. This is especially bad in F451's case because merely reading the book makes you largely immune to its criticism - the passage @Jade posted nails this. If a dystopia is going to serve as a form of social criticism it shouldn't let the reader off the hook so easily, he should be seeing himself in the "sheep" as much as in the characters who stand up and resist. Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange would fit right into F451 as an ultraviolent teenager, but in the movie (haven't read the book) he's portrayed as a sympathetic character and as much of a victim of his twisted society as the people he attacks. By the end of 1984 Winston Smith has learned to love Big Brother, and the reader can almost agree with his reasoning. Both of these characters (and there are plenty of other examples) provide a far more poignant social criticism than Mildred, whose only purpose in F451 is to make Montag and Clarisse look good by constantly acting like a brain-damaged child. I might be wrong here, because it's been a long time since I last read the book, but I don't remember her getting any better in the other two parts. Bradbury seems to think that people like Mildred are predestined for failure and can't be helped, an attitude that I strongly disagree with.
The other big issue I had was with Bradbury's writing style, which @Remember_Summer_Days summarized perfectly. The book is one long chain of poetic similes, one after the other with no prosaic "dust" in between. Many of them are overdone and clunky, but some are really good. I loved the comparison between Montag's scream, the noise of a jet bomber flying overhead, and the sound of a great curtain being torn in two (biblical reference?). The description of the Mechanical Hound (my favorite character, it becomes absolutely terrifying in the second half of the book) as "alive, but not alive" was great. I even liked the overdone description of Clarisse's face as a clock that's been mentioned above, if only as a portrayal of Montag's incoherent racing thoughts that immediately becomes funny with his "What?" (as in "What the fuck am I talking about?") in the next paragraph. As good as these similes are, none of them are given any room to breathe. It's just one damn simile after another, and eventually the ones that land become devalued by the ones that don't. The pace of the novel also suffers, when Montag reacts to finding his wife unconscious all sense of panic is undermined by Bradbury's long and ponderous description of her body.
I'm going to stick with F451 because it does have a lot of things going for it despite all the problems. As I said previously, I think Bradbury's analysis of the problems of modern society is generally correct, and while his writing frequently gets bogged down there are flashes of brilliance that make up for the constant simile abuse. On top of the passages mentioned above, I loved his description of the TV programs Mildred watches. The "interactive play" where all she does it agree with what the characters are saying should sound familiar to anyone who's played a video game in the past decade. Plus, it's a relatively quick read and a good change of pace from the stuff I've been slogging through recently.
The comments in this thread have all been interesting so far, even the ones I didn't address in my post. I'm looking forward to see what people think of Parts 2 and 3.
 
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I found the first section to be interesting and fun to read. I agree with the criticism of Bradbury's writing, but it must be remembered he was a producer of pulp sci fi in the hey day of pulp sci fi -- there was a lot of garbage out there, and even the best of it had some garbage to it. These were books for people to read on the flight from NYC to Chicago and then throw out, they weren't meant to be masterpieces. So, the quality of the work must be put in the context of a man cranking out books to put food on the table. I believe this can explain the flat characters. They have no depth because there was no depth. In my opinion, Ray Bradbury didn't publish half the shitty garbage guys like Heinlein and Silverberg (who are quite brilliant in many cases) put out there. It also makes one appreciate the deep characters and universes of say Lovecraft or PKD all the more.
I thought this line from Beaty's speech particularly summed up the modern corporate-liberal whitewashing of the media:
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
What better way to say replace equality with equity? Bradbury is suggesting the road to hell is paved with equity.
 
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