Fahrenheit 451

As I mentioned previously, there are many books I feel I should have read. A significant number of these are what seems to me like 'boy books' - written by men, about men, and often about typical male subjects like war, space, the solitary male and his psyche, and the like. As such, I find there is a higher threshold to jump in and read these, because they are so distant from me and my frame of reference, even if they are key pieces of literary history. It's just thatI don't think I'll find them that interesting. Yes, I'd still like to read books like Catch-22, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Tropic of Cancer, and a number of others - but it seems more than a chore than a desirable curiosity. Sometimes a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do though, so I tried the waters with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Science fiction is generally not a category I am particularly interested in - I've never seen a Star Wars film, futuristic robots do not intrigue me at all, and Red Dwarf is probably the best exception from the rule, and even then I generally over-looked the space side of things, and focused more on the funnies, and the interesting content coming from lives lived in confined space and environments, a Robinson Crusoe transposed. Still, I've enjoyed futuristic, dystopian tales like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and films like I am Legend (apart from a horribly bad ending, but that is another story). Fahrenheit 451 is similarly pessimistic about the development of this world into the future, and consists of a sad universe where books are burnt, television rules the home, and alternative thinking is not just discouraged, it is actively chased and killed.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature of which paper burns, and the main character is a fireman whose job is to burn books, something he does somewhat ambiguously, and more so as he meets two outsider characters who instil curiosity and despair about the modern lifestyle in him. Lives are lived through and with television, questions are not asked, and there is the distant but omnipresent state which ensure that everyone lives within the norm, or not at all.

It's not a marvellous piece of literature, but the book tells an interesting story, it is an action-filled tale with interesting views on modernity and development. At one point it refers to wars in 1990, which to me already seems like 'the good old days' - and then it struck me that the book was written in the 50s, making what is already 20 years ago the distant future. And the world has indeed developed into a society driven by interactive television, much like Bradbury's vision, although thankfully we haven't resorted to book burning on a systematic scale yet.