It's been many years since I've read this work, though Bradbury has long been a favorite. Sadly, I think I remembered it as a slow-moving narrative, but I was far wrong.

Bradbury's novel is as tightly-written as anything I've read in some years, filled with concise prosody, tense drama, and psychological subtlety. The relationship between Guy and his wife, Fire Chief Beatty's internal struggles, even Clarisse's too-brief appearance as catalyst, all wrap together into a humanity strained tightly into a paradoxical numbness. We are too desperate to share the inanities of television, too fearful of consequence to risk the public question--and, where we meet with anything called contemplative, we label it insanity.

These are the costs of a loss of literature, of the ideas which sustain us. And we don't need to burn the books: we simply have to ignore them.