Comments on Fahrenheit 451

   The title of this blog originated from my love of books, so it is only fitting that my first post be about a book. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, to be exact.

 
   This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for almost a year now. I bought it at a Goodwill with the intent of taking it to read on the plane to Moldova (for those of you who did not know I went to Moldova on a mission trip last summer). I did take it (it's world-famous!), but never opened it. And so it's lonely existence of not being read was extended. I finally picked it back up because it was one of the books on my reading list for school. Usually classical novels like this intimidate me, but I was able to get through it in just a couple days (it's only 165 pages total, so that helped).

   Being a potential graphic designer I really appreciated how the cover looks like it has some wear and tear (books are not treated as nicely in the novel). It looks like the book has a dust jacket that has been ripped to reveal the hard cover underneath. Pretty cool, right?

 
   The first copy of Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953. The story is set in a dystopian future (this is before dystopian fiction was cool), probably somewhere in the twenty-first century. Because the story is set close to our current time I found it interesting to see how the technological advances compared. Some go beyond what is possible today (fire-proof houses) or fall short of modern technology (sorry, no internet), and in a few cases, match up almost spot-on with what we have today (devices with Bluetooth capabilities!).
 
   In the book society has degraded to the point where books are considered illegal. This is a decision made by the majority of the population, not the government. Firemen in the traditional sense are no longer needed, thanks to the invention of fire-proof houses. Instead, their job is to burn books. I don't think that these kinds of Firemen will be needed in our current society, but Mr. Bradbury does provide criticism on some of our potential fatal flaws.
 
   I enjoyed this book much more than I was expecting to; it is an interesting insight into what could have been our future.