* fahrenheit 451 by ray bradbury

* i found a stash of my high school and college book reviews.  any askterisked titles denotes a book review from this period.

february 14, 1994

Fahrenheit 451, by ray bradbury, takes place in a distant future of the 1990's.  guy montag is a fireman who burns books rather than saving houses and other burning buildings.  one day he meets a girl who is carefree and looks at the simple pleasures of life.  she ends up talking to montag, almost every day, about the little things like looking at the dew on the grass in the morning or the smell of burning leaves.  montag starts to change from being a slave to the society to becoming an individual for himself.  later on, guy finds out that the girl and her family disappear and he becomes suspicious.  guy also starts to take books from the houses he is burning.  capteam beatty, the head of the firemen, comes to talk to montag.  beatty knows that montag is starting to question the society in which they live.  beatty ends up explaining the reasons behind burning the books.  guy ends up killing all the firemen in his unit during a burning and then goes on the run.  he escapes and just when he gets to a camp of runaways, just like him, another war breaks out and the city he left was obliterated.  the story ends with the runaways walking back to the city.

this book is well-written and has an excellent meaning to it when it talks about censorship and how far it could go.  this book also shows the change in guy montag at the end of the story.  at the beginning, guy was just another person, but as the story progressed he gradually changed from being a common villain, to a hero who has beaten the corrupted system.

the theme of the book is all about censorship.  ray bradbury's whole point was to avoid the censorship of anything pure.  he protests the whole idea of shortening plays and writing condensed versions of plays and books and whatever else is written by original authors.  he is against anything that cuts, destroys, or makes anything of the work, other than itself in its original form.

fahrenheit 451 is one of the best books that has been written by ray bradbury and has an excellent message that every person in american should learn and remember.  every person is himself and no one else should judge how he should express himself or take away the right to do so.

mr. puckett gave me a 49/50 on the report; with the comment 'a little too much story-telling but not bad.  what is the significance of the title?'

1984 by george orwell

my wife and i read 1984 while we were driving on our vacation.  it was a really fascinating book, albeit sad and disheartening (the end of it anyway).

i simply don't have much to say about it.  more than anything else, reading the book together provided us an opportunity to discuss real-world events going on that indicate we could live in a 1984-like society someday.

we talked about real-life examples of how political and religious leaders will say one thing but in reality they are saying the complete opposite.

the telescreens was prescient; especially in our world today where it is practically de facto known that the NSA spies on every u.s. citizen.  obviously not to the extent of what the telescreens do, but we are not off by far today from something like that happening.

in my opinion, the best dialogue my wife and i had was about how julia and winston viewed their world.  julia simply wanted to enjoy it and really was not motivated to "bring down ingsoc", while winston seemed to have a desire to seek the real truth and rectify the situation.  it is true, a lot of people would gladly remain blind to what governments and some religions to today, while others would attempt to scrounge courage to seek true justice.

anyway - good book, but the dialogue between my wife and i was what i most enjoyed about reading this book.