Name: Fahrenheit 451
Rating: 3.841383812010444 (2681 reviews)
ISBN: 9786073107372

Ray Bradbury

Alfredo Crespo

Fahrenheit 451

GAHHH the ending 😭😭 such a good book but that ending kills me i wish it continued even for 2 more chapters i was dying to know how everything turned out for him. The ending totally suits the book though.

lola 🫶

Luca Doppelhofer

Truly an amazing take on dystopia. You could use this novel as a philosophy textbook, I constantly ponder Bradbury’s postulation that anti-intellectualism takes root when you no longer interact with intellectual texts (I’m not saying AI summaries are going to lead to book burning, but I’m also not NOT saying that…). Overall a great read for anyone angry or confused or just looking for a thrilling premise, there’s plenty of action and suspense in between the existentialism!

Sebastian

Farenheit 451

Andrew Hawkins

I liked it. Weird story but it is very much worth reading. Crazy how on point some of it is to modern day mindsets. 

David

Fahrenheit 451 me parece un libro de fácil lectura, de fácil entender y qué te deja pensando. En su tiempo, era una advertencia sobre el idiotizador de la televisión, pero leyéndolo en el estado actual de la sociedad, en la época del doomscrolling quizás lo podamos entender ahora como una advertencia a esto mismo, y el tema no mejora con el auge de la inteligencia artificial. ¿En qué momento dejamos de hacernos las preguntas importantes, para pasar a hablar cosas que quizás no tengan tanto sentido? ¿Tanto nos ha comido la cabeza las redes sociales? Sé que igualmente, hablar de esto y pensar que uno tiene la opinión absoluta es estúpido en sí mismo, porque yo también uso redes sociales y yo también hablo de cosas banales, pero me hace pensar hasta qué punto llegaremos de que pensar sea algo considerado "malo"

Belén Miranda

<blockquote>
 
 «Éste es un tiempo en que las flores crecen a costa de otras flores, en vez de vivir de la lluvia y la tierra.»
 
</blockquote> <blockquote>
 
 —Todos deben dejar algo al morir, decía mi abuelo. Un niño o un libro o un cuadro o una casa o una pared o un par de zapatos. O un jardín. Algo que las manos de uno hayan tocado de algún modo. El alma tendrá entonces a donde ir el día de la muerte, y cuando la gente mire ese árbol, o esa flor, allí estará uno. 
 
</blockquote> <blockquote>
 
 «[…] y mientras no lo olvidemos, mientras lo tengamos ante nosotros, es posible que un día dejemos de preparar la pira funeraria y de saltar a ella. En cada generación seremos unos pocos más para recordar. 
 
</blockquote>

Gave me lots to think about and was more engaging and enjoyable than expected

Henry Passmore

Tim Robbins

Midnight Ink Drinker

One of my favorite parts was the idea behind the firemen and their role in society. It was such a sharp twist, and it really pulled me into the story. I also loved how descriptive the writing was—I could clearly imagine the parlors and the chaos. I definitely appreciated the writing style. My main issue was how fast everything moved. The story felt very quick, and Montag’s growth happened so suddenly that it didn’t fully feel believable to me. The characters overall felt dense at times, but that also felt intentional and part of the point the author was making.

451 Grad Fahrenheit oder 232 Grad Celsius – die Temperatur, bei der Papier verbrennt. Guy Montag ist Feuerwehrmann. Es ist seine Aufgabe, Bücher zu beschlagnahmen und zu verbrennen. Denn Bücher sind die Quelle allen Unglücks ... Mit "Fahrenheit 451" hat Ray Bradbury Literaturgeschichte geschrieben – neben Orwells "1984" und Huxleys "Schöne neue Welt" gibt es nichts Vergleichbares.

source: https://www.randomhouse.de/Paperback/Fahrenheit-451/Ray-Bradbury/Heyne/e338760.rhd#info

Lilah Welch

Bárbara Borba

Some interesting ideas but written in a too flowery way to be appreciated. Not for me.

Muy a pesar de ser una distopía y mostrar un escenario complejo y desesperanzador, esta novela es de las pocas del género que dejan una luz de esperanza.

Carlos Luna

"In this volume, introductory essays situate the novel in its historical and cultural context and also survey its critical reception, while subsequent chapters explore Bradbury's creation and reworking of the story, issues such as memory, love and morality, domesticity, intellectual property and censorship, and the appeal of Fahrenheit 451 in other media. Rounding out the volume is a bibliography of other important critical sources for readers seeking to study the novel and its themes further" -- provided by publisher.

With all kinds of narratives in today’s world, this is the book for all.

Somi Patel

great book. i found it a bit slow at first, but a few pages in you just can’t stop reading. i’ve been wanting to read this for years and the irony is, the more years pass the more fitting it becomes to our society. i didn’t expect that ending, i did like it because it gives you a sense of hope (that montag can succeed in changing something) and also curiosity about where he could go next. i also did expect something else, just because i wanted to see what would happen after the war started to montag’s, faber’s and the others’ lives but still an open ending is really good. 

ariel

Tim Pendry

'Fahrenheit 451' (1953) is deservedly a classic although a reading nearly three quarters of a century later cannot but see its flaws. Bradbury's determination on a polemic about the conditions of his time undermines its literary coherence and gives us an ending that has too much hysteria embedded. The book is one of several that the liberal intellectual community has sanctified as dystopian science fiction and which embody its anxieties about technological and populist modernity - Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' (1931/1932) and George Orwell's '1984' (1949) being the most obvious. In their reactions to their contemporary worlds, such novels are, in fact, deeply conservative while still belonging to the patrician progressive world that would inspire Harper Lee to deal with race relations as courtroom drama in 1960. Anxiety could then shift to 'hope' again. What is remarkable about the book is just how much of the future world (if you remove the more specific Cold War aspects of the case) chimes with our world. The material and social environment, allowing for caricature, is uncannily like ours in most respects other than book burning. Does it tell us much more than that liberal-minded intellectuals were becoming genuinely terrified of democratic totalitarianism in the age of the 'Red Scare'? Does it tell us that they actually had something to fear rather than that such a fear had to be expressed regardless of reality? When the book was written, it was reasonable to believe that radical anti-communist purges and enforcement of Cold War conformity might result in serious threats to liberal freedoms. Nuclear war was also a reasonable anxiety. The book reflects these concerns. In fact, the crisis blew over and nuclear war diminished as threat over time although never absolutely off the agenda. Intellectual fears were both genuine anxieties and proved to be exaggerated. The real threats were to come much later in the eventual collapse of regard for the intellectual. Liberal intellectuals can often be defined by their anxieties. Literature (or rather narrative as we move into a streamed world) is their way of expressing their anxieties. Their claim is that narrative reflects truth or at least some deeper 'inner' truth that 'writers' have access to. I am not so sure. Telling stories and telling truths about the world are different categories of experience just as religion and scientific enquiry are different categories of making sense of the world. We can judge a text separately on its narrative skill and on its meaningfulness then and now. In this case, Bradbury's narrative skill is undoubted, at least until his fireman (a burner of books) sets himself free, ends up with a peculiar community of book memorisers and watches the burning of the city he has left from a nuclear strike. This just gets silly in its aspirational liberalism. This idea of the world burning and having to be created anew was not uncommon in science fiction of the 1950s - Walter Miller's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' (1959) might be regarded as its most complete expression - but it does seem over the top now and a parable for its time and not ours. Bradbury's solution to civilisational collapse (old intellectuals memorising texts) is a form of class self-love and a loss of nerve after a solid story that deserved something more than the wet dream of a liberal with no solution to the problem he had set himself of post-nuclear recovery. Indeed, this may be the central weakness of the book. 'Fahrenheit 451' is supposed to be about a culture in which knowledge is trivialised into non-existence, with book-burning making this process material and visceral. We are only two decades away from Hitler's 1933 PR stunt. By switching tack to the theme of civilisational destruction as a result of nuclear war, Bradbury makes that classic mistake of trying to sell two ideas and so not selling either fully. OK, so he sold the book as iconic but the meaning of both themes is weakened to the simplistic. This is a shame because Bradbury has integrity. He fairly puts the case for book burning articulately in the mouth of cynical realist Captain Beatty. Montag (the protagonist) resolves his situation on that occasion with violence not argument and against the pacific core liberal values of the author. Much of the rest of the book is about trying to get away from the problem that there are arguments for cultural trivialisation based on the depressive effects of intellectualism and that such arguments can perhaps only be resolved through power struggle, organisation and violence. Bradbury has to scuttle from Montag's gut position somehow because it threatens to turn liberalism into violent liberation that is too damn close to the expectations of Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy which would in turn justify the repression that Bradbury is trying to stand against. This leads us to his weak 'memory' solution and the attempt to make it meaningful through the pessimistic negativity of assuming it would work (which is unlikely) in the event of some inevitable nuclear war (intellectual pessimism proving itself to be highly depressive). The book thus becomes a classic because it raises its problem 'safely'. School teachers and liberals could satisfy themselves that just raising the problem in a free society and persuading through education would unravel the crisis. They were right ... but only up to a point and inauthentically. 'Fahrenheit 451' (like '1984' and 'Brave New World') are 'conservative' liberal polemics that represent 'warnings' based on radical extrapolations of things being seen to happen around the reader. They instil fear in order to offer coded corrections to trends that intellectuals have become anxious about. From this point on, such texts have to change thought and behaviour but to do so safely so that liberal values are not lost in excessive acceptance of what is after all only a story and not reality. No liberal writer actually wants people to do anything but only not to do some things. These books should be respected and judged as literature but we should be cautious about their meaning both in the world in which they were created where they acted as mythologising texts about contemporary reality and as retained iconic status. They simplify material and social complexity. As art, Bradbury offers us a classic with narrative flaws (derived from the drive towards an obvious polemic). As truth about the world, it is religion more than science, an expression of class anxiety that mythologises to persuade. It is of its time albeit with potential uses in ours. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the book is that the book burning is the bit that gets the attention but Bradbury equally explores another aspect of cultural politics that has been placed second by the book's iconisation - the political determination on happiness through entertainment. It is here that Bradbury has something important to say that is far more concerning than book burnings that never took place place and never were going to take place even under Edgar and Joe - that is, that being happy and thinking may require a political choice between them. Of course, some people are very happy thinking but any serious form of thinking will create questions. Questions eventually mean questions about our condition and that of society. 'Education' has, in our culture, ceased to educate along these lines except as ideological oppositionalism. Captain Beatty helps to articulate the essence of the problem. For most people, most of the time, the right to happiness, apparently guaranteed in the US Declaration of Independence, is extremely elusive. If happiness is such a right and the State can deliver it, who is to say that the job is not being done. This is not a simple case of right and wrong. The liberal intellectual has a class interest in associating thinking with happiness. The rest of humanity may not. The real issue in Fahrenheit 451 is the loss of having choice on which path to take. Bradbury is raising a question but avoiding its implications. The risk is that, in demanding free thought and adopting a moral position against mass media and the cult of happiness, the liberal intellectual might be arrogantly placing the majority in the oppressive position of having to be depressed and anxious in order to ensure a 'freedom' pleasurable to few. Of course, the ideal is the freedom to choose to be happy or thoughtful and this would be the liberal value worth preserving. Bradbury is noting here that politics is forcing a choice for the first at the expense of the second but an oppressive position would equally be to force the second. And there is another factor in the book that needs teasing out - the worship of texts and even of narrative itself when we have noted that texts (such as the Bible which plays a significant role in the book) and narrative cannot be assumed to be consonant with the truth of existence. Bradbury's assumption here is that the liberal canon - what would become Bloomism later - offers a superior status and understanding of the world. This is dubious even if the attitude appealed to generations of initially liberal but now conservative school teachers, professors and writers. What the canon offers (whether Don Quixote or Dosteoevsky) are arcane pleasures, class cohesion for the intelligensia in a culture, a contribution to social cohesion (now largely lost, a process which in itself is worth studying) and a way of training cadres in a liberal society. I read, therefore I rule. Much of liberal angst then and now is terror that a complex and networked system of cultural and so political rule - covering academia, publishing and media as much as governance, judiciary and executive powers - will be unravelled into barbarism or the mob by abandoning 'liberal values'. We can guess Bradbury would have been as horrified as any liberal intellectual by Trump and populism (as British equivalents are by Farage and Brexit) for this reason. The complexity of society requires simplification and the liberal requires it to be simplified in the direction of narrative. Narrative, of course, is complex and so necessarily exclusive of those not prepared to study according to its dictates but the idea of the superiority of narrative is the simple idea. Language is channelled into approved texts that offer 'ideas' with a history and the whole becomes 'culture'. 'Fahrenheit 451' thus becomes an interesting text about the importance of texts in a definition of civilisation that comes to be couched in radically hysterical and anxious terms in order to protect it from caricatured opponents whether presented as Big Brother or salamander trucks. In this context, it becomes vitally 'true' as cultural mythos because if there is one thing liberal civilisation understands it is that its version of civilisation (not the only one by any means) is extremely vulnerable to loss of narrative control. Narrative becomes the weapon that defends itself.

Jennifer

This is Black Mirror in book form before Black Mirror was a thing. Mostly corny, kinda brilliant, at least in parts. Very thought provoking especially in terms of the current argument that there is too much conflict and offense these days. What would happen if we eliminated conflicting thoughts or perspectives? What would happen if we censored anything that offended anyone? But I got bored with it. This was easy to put down. Although I can see how this might have inspired books like Ready Player One, I think the more contemporary books are better and this one was...corny. There’s no other word that describes how I feel about this. I get why it’s a classic. I understand the innovative ideas it ponders, but I still thought the plot was unexciting. Sue me.

Melissa Cometto

Da amante dei libri non capisco come io abbia potuto aspettare così tanto prima di leggere questo romanzo. E forse la risposta è semplice: certi libri arrivano quando devono arrivare. E questo è arrivato nel momento storico più giusto e più doloroso possibile. Fahrenheit 451 è un romanzo che parla di libri bruciati. Ma in realtà parla di qualcosa di molto più inquietante: parla di persone che smettono di voler pensare. In un mondo dove i pompieri non spengono incendi ma li appiccano per distruggere i libri, la cultura diventa pericolosa. La conoscenza è scomoda. La memoria è una minaccia. E mentre leggevo, non riuscivo a non pensare a quanto questo scenario non sia poi così lontano dalla nostra realtà. Viviamo in un’epoca in cui, in alcuni paesi, libri che hanno accompagnato la nostra crescita vengono censurati, modificati, banditi. E la domanda che mi martella è una sola: Come si può bandire la fantasia dalla vita di un bambino? La malizia non è nelle storie. È negli occhi di chi le vuole controllare. Chi vuole persone sedate davanti a uno schermo. Conformi. Consumatori. Ignari del passato. Perché un popolo che non legge è un popolo che non ricorda. E un popolo che non ricorda è più facile da governare. Bradbury non ha scritto solo una distopia. Ha scritto un avvertimento. Questo libro non è solo da leggere. È da difendere. Leggete. Vivete altre vite. Assorbite idee. Fatevi domande scomode. In Fahrenheit 451 il fuoco distrugge la carta. Nel nostro mondo, spesso, è l’indifferenza a fare il lavoro sporco. Non servono sempre pompieri con lanciafiamme. Basta convincere le persone che i libri siano inutili. Lenti. Superflui. Che sia meglio uno schermo che ti dice cosa pensare. Questo romanzo non mi ha dato speranza. Mi ha dato inquietudine. E forse è giusto così. Perché la ribellione non è romantica. È scomoda. È solitaria. È faticosa. E oggi, più che mai, leggere è un atto politico. La ribellione più grande, oggi, è ancora aprire un libro. E continuare a farlo. Non sono i libri a essere pericolosi. È chi li teme. E se un giorno non troveremo più storie sugli scaffali, non sarà perché le hanno bruciate. Sarà perché abbiamo smesso di difenderle. Il problema non è quando iniziano a bruciare i libri. Il problema è quando nessuno sente più l’odore del fumo.

Fahrenheit 451

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