Fahrenheit 451

I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury for book club. I think I read this back in high school, but it's been awhile. The book description says, "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."

This is not the type of book I really enjoy reading, even though I know it's a classic and an important read. I pushed myself through it but usually wasn't super engaged. Some parts I liked (since most of it wasn't really my thing): I did like Clarisse, but she had a very short part in the book. I also liked the group Montag ended up with in the end, and I liked the message about the power of books. I liked a quote toward the end where Granger talked about his grandfather who died. He said, "When he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on." That quote really spoke to me because I reacted to it with the loss of my mother-in-law a few years ago. So overall, not my kind of book, but good for my brain to read it and some parts I liked that I can discuss at book club.

Rating: * (1/3 = It was okay)