If you love books, read this. It will tear your heart out to think of all the ideas in books being set to flame. If you're a slow reader, this will make you want to speed up. If you're a fast reader, this will make you want to speed-read. This books presents a future of little questioning and ultimate control. If you are a bibliophile, this book will stir your soul. I cannot recommend it enough.

Throughout high school, this book was always on the summer reading list. For one reason or another, I never chose to read it. I wish I had taken the time to read this sooner. Fahrenheit 451 now has a spot on my list of favorite books and I have already started recommending it to people.

I greatly enjoyed this book but was surprisingly disappointed by the ending. I don't really know what I was expecting. I felt like the ending was lacking compared to the rest of the story. I also didn't like what happened with Clarisse. She wasn't a great character, but I thought there could have been more of an explanation.

Everyone who loves books should read this one. Read and keep reading in case we're no longer allowed to in the future.

Quite a scary book. 451 degrees is the temp at which paper burns. Quite a terrible thought for anyone that belongs to a club like this! And to think it is true in some countries - and could be in ours if we don't watch out!

An older Bradbury novel that - altho not yet happening - points out exactly what can happen if we do not protect our freedoms and the American way of life. Is Big Brother watching????

This is probably one of my favorite books of all time. I read it back in the 70's and loved it. I bought it for my daughter in the 90's and loved it again. Once again I got this book for my son 5 years ago and read it for the third time. This is a MUST READ for all readers. Anyone that says it is unbelievable has their head in the sand. This book will stay with you forever, the definition of a classic!!

This book is more true today then it was when it was first written. Forget TV, Movies, and doing something every minute of the day. Everyone needs to sit back and read a book now and then. More so now than ever.

I read this book once as a teenager and enjoyed it then. Surprisingly, it stood the test of time and I enjoyed it as much now. I found the issues it covered to be even more relevant today.

For such a short book, there is an incredible amount of material to think about, discuss and analyze. While it is unlikely that books will be banned in the near future, "political correctness" and censorship is alive and well and will only get worse as media increasingly represents the interests of the corporate elite and literature is simplified and edited of anything that may be considered "offensive."

This book, considered a classic, is a very quick read, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's nothing worth merit! "Fahrenheit 451" is an excellent dystopic novel, set in a future where firemen burn books to suppress freethought and learning. Stated by the author as a warning against the "evils" of television, the reader of this book can also take away lessons of censorship and totalitarianism. A must-read, especially for people who think reading is unimportant. This will wake them up!

Any book worth its salt will offend someone in some way; and if it makes you question why, all the better. The power of this book is not in the simplistic tale of a society where fireman set fires and burn books, not because it's illegal to own them, but because it's a crime to read them. Rather, it's the insidious nature of censorship that fascinated Bradbury. In the Coda at the end of the book, he vehemently protests any defanging of books in pursuit of political correctness. "For it is a mad world," he writes, "and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics."

In an interesting passage halfway through Fahrenheit, Bradbury discusses where good books derive their magic - the way they "stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us" - as well as their proper context and purpose: 1. for a book to be considered good, it must contain "truthfully recorded details of life"; 2. there should be an appropriate amount of leisure time to contemplate & digest what you've read; 3. based on what you've read & digested - proceeding to act thoughtfully.

A classic. Guy Montag, a man whose job it is to start fires, enjoys his job very much. He never considered how much joy and pleasure he had watching pages and pages being consumed by the flames, until her met her. She, a simple young seventeen-year-old, told him of a past where people were not afraid of what was out there. Books banned, thrown about, burned. Montag changes the whole image, he risks his job, his family, everything for justice and for the right thing to be done. An exceptional book full of real life problems we seem to still face today, Ray Bradbury takes a simple plot and turns it into something amazing. A must read for everyone.

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I can't believe I haven't read this book before. It was amazing. It's a small little gem, but it really made me stop and think. It revolves around a society that is more interested in doing things, keeping busy, and being 'happy' and avoids even bans reading or thinking. Divergent thoughts are enemies to this society so they've collectively decided that the best way to combat that is to burn books.

Firemen now set fires instead of putting them out in this society. Guy Montag is the protaganist of this story, and as a fireman he has burned books, and the houses that contained them for 10 years. It's a really compelling read to watch Guy change from an enthusiastic fireman to a fugitive that is hoarding books. It's a classic story about censorship, war and the shutting down of the intellect.

A classic that I was compelled to read because "I should." It was worth reading, but not my favorite.

This was a great book, especially since it included an interview with the author in 2000. It took me very little time to read and was very exciting!

It's amazing how relevant this book still is to today's society. It's written gorgeously, and though it's a short read, quite captivating. I finished in a span of several hours and feel it time well spent.

As this is considered a "classic warning" book, I had to read it. Now I've read it.

I did not enjoy this at all. Bradbury's style of writing was like watching a fat ugly woman trying to be sexy doing a pole dance. It was revolting. The story was just another "oh watchout, society will fall apart if we don't keep our freedoms" tale that litters the literary landscape.

The one main flaw in his reasoning that stood out to me was this: a culture and technology that can keep the masses happy and sedated must be led by people who actually DO read and know things. The problem is, those kind of people would not have been able to grow up in the society that Bradbury envisions for this book. Therefore the culture he warns about couldn't exist because the architects of it would have been cut off before they could create it. A circular reasoning mess.

Besides, we have Kindles and Cool-ers and PRS-505's and other ereaders now. And the internet. Books aren't going away.

I read this in school so I thought I should read it again. I couldn't really get into it this time around and I usually do not stick with books if they do not engage me right away.

This is a book I should have read back when I was a teen, but somehow I never did. It's a widely celebrated book, dealing as it does with book burning, which sadly remains a problem even today.

The book's about a fireman named Guy Montag, living in an America where books are illegal. Those who own them are whisked away for re-education, and their books are burned by the firemen. Books, after all, contain ideas, and those ideas can be dangerously subversive and interfere with the happiness that is everyone's God-given right.

Looked at in that light, you're likely to expect the book to be about a totalitarian state that is trying to keep people in the dark, as any number of petty thugs with small minds and big Cultural Revolutions have tried over the centuries. The book is a little more insidious than that, though. It's about how we have done this to ourselves.

There are essentially two poles that Montag moves between, and each is revelatory in what it says about America as it may have been, and America as it may be. The first pole is Clarisse, an unusual 17-year-old who stops to enjoy the world around her. While cars drive past at 100 mph or more, Clarisse walks. She smells flowers, listens to the wind, and looks at the leaves. She tells Montag stories she's heard from her uncle about the Way Things Used to Be, when people talked with one another, and neighbors knew one another, and people stopped to enjoy themselves and allowed themselves to be miserable at times. She's the naif innocent, but she represents the purity of what even in the 1950s Bradbury sensed was being lost.

The other pole is Montag's wife, Mildred, who spends her day in a room with television screens on three walls, watching shows that are computer-altered to appear personalized for her, down to the ads. The shows are stupid, pathetic, utterly banal -- but to Mildred, they are her family. The thought of not watching the TV -- of not getting a fourth TV screen to complete the room -- is unbearable. When Montag does turn the TV off at one point, she gets hysterical.

And just think, Bradbury wrote this in the 1950s, before the days of widescreen TV, before we had 24-hour cable and satellite signals, and before the advent of the Internet with its personalized entertainment options.

In Montag's world, books were banned because no one read them anymore, and not enough people cared. Books are dismissed as meaningless and impenetrable, and so the ideas they contain are lost, because those ideas could make people uncomfortable.

It's an interesting book, and it probably would have been better read at a time when I wasn't six hours into a dreadfully insomniatic night, but I'm glad I finally read it.

different cover

The classic...

This is a book required for a class. Classic novel.

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