Jordan Anderson's Reviews > Fahrenheit 451

Like most middle school students in America, I was forced to read this book. And while no kid enjoys being told what to read and how to read it, I can recall, knowing, even then, that Fahrenheit 451 was awful.

Fast forward 20 something years and I figured I would give this one another go. After all, I ended up loving The Great Gatsby once I was out of high school and chose to read it on my own.

Well, the same can't be said of 451. Unlike those previous re-reads, giving Bradbury's seminal novel another chance only made me hate it even more and realize that 13 year old me actually could recognize shit for what it was 20 plus years ago.

I could go on and on and on about how much I absolutely loathe this novel. I could talk about Bradbury's failure to tell a good story, his almost plagiarism of Orwell's far superior 1984. I could mention how terrible his characters are or how flat out awful he seems as a human being (read his "coda" at the back of this edition), but I'll let this one passage from the book sum up the extent of how mind numbingly idiotic 451 is...

"He saw himself in her yes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and held him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile as crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but--what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of candle. One time as. a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon..."

Seriously? What the hell? Bradbury wastes 9 sentences to tell us that Montag sees his reflection in the eyes of some other girl. That's just literary diarrhea at this point. Words for word's sake. Words to fill the void to sound smart, when all it does is waste space with pointless metaphor and bore the everloving hell out of the reader.

I'd forgive Bradbury if this was the only occurrence, but nope. Every damn page is populated with this cholera of language, spewing from the ass end of Bradbury's overactive imagination. If he would have actually spent time on telling a story that wasn't half assed and rushed, maybe we wouldn't hear about being stuck on some desert in the middle of the living room or hear how books are like burnt butterflies for the upteenth time.

Yeah, Fahrenheit 451sucks. Its just a bunch of pretentious and overdone drivel under the guise of "classic literature". I try to be kind to books, especially ones that are so universally lauded, however that's not gonna be the case with this one; 451 easily moves into one of my least favorite novels ever written and is probably at the top of the podium.