Fahrenheit 451

Well... this is a book that has not aged well.

Or maybe I've just outgrown its particular flavor of book-nerd wish fulfillment. TV rots the brain! Reading books is important for civilized society! People who read books are better than people who don't: they have richer interior lives, they question, they really see the world around them! Being plugged in all the time = bad! Kids these days, driving cars too fast and shooting each other!

On the whole it reads to me now like conservative pearl-clutching about how We Have Too Much Technology and We Should Return To A Simpler Time and stuff like that. Personally, my suspicion is that even before TV and the internet, there were plenty of people who were shallow and didn't lead rich interior lives and didn't engage critically with the world around them. And probably also plenty of people who saw this as the decline of civilization.

But even so, I do like some of the writing. No one can deny Bradbury wields a mean metaphor.



Addendum: I could do without Bradbury's ridiculous 1979 screed, included as an addendum with the Kindle edition, that more openly gets at something the novel more covertly hints at. He describes women who wonder why he has so few female characters as “idiots” and rails against over-sensitive politically-correct “minorities” trying to censor him and meddle with his aesthetics (basically book-burners themselves, he outright states).

I'm willing to forgive the original text for being a product of its time, but the 1979 doubling-down does my opinion of Bradbury no favors.