Reading this classic title in 2024 with a (hopefully) fully developed prefrontal cortex has given me a perspective that I might not have had, have I read this book in my much, much younger days. Because Fahrenheit 451 sounds a lot more incel than I anticipated, and I HAD predicted to see a certain amount of incelness, considering that the book was written by a man who deemed himself intelligent in the 50s.

Oh, and that man DOES looooooooooooooooooove his books.
He loves his books SO MUCH that sometimes the way he talks about books make me laughing a little bit; it just feels so over the top.
Books are good, alright, but they're not... they're not this.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

What the fuck is that metaphor????
Only a cishet man would make a metaphor about BOOKWRITING using rape (and sexual harassment, too) and thinking he nailed it.
I can only shudder, knowing there are lots and LOTS of people reading the very same metaphor and thinking how great it is.

Not to mention the way Bradbury treat his female characters. Ugh. UGH. EW. EWWW. Clarisse McClellan is the quirky, pretty, underage you're-not-like-the-other-girls girl whose sole purpose is to bring 'enlightenment' to our protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag is in his 30s, mind you, and if someone his age finds enlightenment ONLY AFTER meeting an almost-seventeen teenage girl... dude has a problem (and by extension, maybe Bradbury did, too). Mildred, Montag's wife, is an empty, vapid, thoughtless person who refuses to think, to listen, to be a decent marriage partner, and to care about her husband, and is even described as "thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon". Lord, if that's not hatred, I don't know what is. And the other housewives are depicted as gossipy bunch who spend their time talking nonsense over teas and snacks. Women get zero respect in this book.

But Fahrenheit 451 does have many good lines and thinking pieces (remember, Bradbury regards himself intelligent, and this book is filled with his inner thoughts disguised as monologues--some are rather okay, some reeks of an old man lamenting the advance in technologies and human's ever-changing lifestyle), and those are the sole reason I'm giving it two stars.

Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. ... Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. ... 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.”

I guess the greatest thing to take away from this book is the realization that Bradbury predicted TikTok.