A review by wolvenbolt
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

They say "Don't judge a book by it's cover", 
I say "Don't be hasty with your judgement".

I took notes, so here's how I felt starting the book, so you can compare to how I felt as the book went on:

"A literal quote:

Speed up the film Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all necessary, time-wasting thought!

...what the fuck is this shit? This book constantly comes out with nonsense like this, this book feels like it was written by a mad man in dreamy prose."

Yeah, I wasn't exactly kind at the beginning of this book and it felt like I was swept up in a mad man's diatribe 😂
But I realised it's simply prose I'm not familiar with, Tolkein's prose is often referred to as" flowery", I'd say Bradbury's prose in this book is "dreamy".
It grew on me as the the book went along, drawing me in, making it intimate.

If truly felt like I was inside Montag's mind, his complex and ponderous mind as it was in the initial stages of a mind freed from the shackles of oppression, and the fear, uncertainty and rage that came along with it.

We didn't know a huge amount about the outside world, who was raging war and why, and normally I'd be bothered by that, but in this case I was far more engaged by Montag and his journey. I loved Faber, such an interesting character.

This book felt like a warning to the intellectuals and the learned folk, to not let their knowledge and pursuit of knowledge fool themselves into a belief of superiority.
That making everyone equally ignorant doesn't make everyone happy and safe.

A book is not the only receptacle of knowledge and storytelling; long before books, there were people. People are the oldest receptacles of knowledge and stories. You may burn our books, reduce our libraries and computers to ash, but it's people who carry knowledge, people spread their wisdom, people tell their tales, and while it can be a long game of Chinese whispers with the knowledge and stories being passed along taking on new iterations and forms, it's the heart of it that stays the same. It's the heart of it, not the words, but the understanding, that is what is passed along and imprints itself on the mind and soul. We take in the knowledge, and it's not ours, but in time it becomes part of us, part of who we are, it's meaning joins with our own web of meanings, the knowledge let's us express who we are. Just how our atoms scatter over billions of years and form new things, the knowledge is reduced to atoms, which join with our own, forming new versions of us, in time, often inperceptably.

And so, this book, this crazy and mind-bending book, is not only a ward against intellectual ego and snobbery, but also a love letter, a love letter to the romantic heart of humanity, to the romance of putting pen to paper, the pacing of knowledge, and the patience of wisdom.

I loved this book very much.

I'd like to end this review with another quote, which made me emotional:

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And 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.

Edit:
Just found this amazing quote from the author himself at the end of the book which perfectly summarises the meaning I took from this book:

"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
- Ray Bradbury