FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

"'Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities... The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any(body)...anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!... Authors full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the... snobbish critics said, were dishwater... It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.'"

Addressing Montag's concerns, while shattering (at least denting) his world at the same time, Captain Beatty, chief fireman, explains, among other things, his and Montag's profession. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, like 1984, is a look into an alternate terrifying future, the theme of Bradbury's being, "What if firemen started fires and being literate was basically a crime,"

His shift over, Montag begins heading home. On the way, he meets Clarisse McClellan, a peculiar young girl who, through a couple conversations, instigates Montag's questioning. "Why do firemen burn books," being the most prominent question.

Through several events, including a house and all the occupants of it being burned and Montag's secret being revealed, Montag meets a professor named Faber, who helps him realize what must be done for people to learn to live to a fuller extent again, rather than to just be content with simplicity and entertainment. Ironic how Faber and Montag believe to truly live, you must become learned (not necessarily literate though), as opposed to the "current" trend of driving vehicles in excess of one hundred miles an hour, among other favorite pastimes. Formulating a plan to topple the firemen hierarchy and renew an interest in learning and thinking, Faber and Montag take the beginning steps of that journey. This being a short story ("dime novel," according to Bradbury), not much can be written in a review without giving a lot of the plot away.

However, I will hop all the way around these spoilers. Clarisse is at the center of a problem that affects and plagues Montag, he never learning the true resolution to the problem. Faber assists Montag in formulating battle plans and executing them against the firemen, Montag being the inside man, Faber being inside Montag's ear. The Mechanical Hound, the firehouse's "mascot," trails Montag and is the cause of a compromising problem for him, which ends up having to be solved with fire and death.

In a world where nobody tries to change the standardized way of living, where everybody is satisfied with not reading, Montag takes a stand. He feels as if something is missing from his life and books being the only obvious thing actually missing from it, he pursues saving them. This he does, going against his wife, his coworkers, even the world's ways in general.

Fahrenheit 451 is comparable to Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power," in the sense that in both short stories, a method of learning that has been with humanity for at least a thousand years each, reading and mathematics that is, is forgotten/done away with. Despite both being set in the future, these stories have the potential to teach a lot about the current/constant human condition. If that is too cryptic, read the stories and then prove me wrong. With that said, I recommend this book.