Number of pages: 158
Number of reading days: 1
Why I read this book: Read for the Summer Nerdfighter's Book Club with John and Hank Green.
"Green says they chose Fahrenheit 451 after Bradbury's death last month at 91 when they read that he had sold fewer books in his lifetime than the erotic FiftyShades of Grey trilogy sold in the last month, 'which we found sadly funny.'" - "Nerdfighter book club raises temperature on Fahrenheit 451," USA Today
"Q: Why choose it for the Nerdfighters Book Club?
A: I think it will be really interesting to discuss the themes of the novel — particularly thinking about the ways context and sustained intellectual engagement adds meaning to human life — in a place (the Internet) that is not exactly known for sustained intellectual engagement. Social networks are often home to precisely the kinds of factoids and half-truths that Bradbury worries about in Fahrenheit 451. Nerdfighters are trying to build spaces online that can foster the kind of thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor that isn't always easy to find online. (Certainly, it is easier to find cute pictures of cats, for instance.) As we often say in the Nerdfighter community, "The truth resists simplicity," and I think Fahrenheit 451 is a great example of a novel that proves more complex and nuanced the closer you read." - "John Green on why books beat any iPad app," USA Today
Thoughts: I ate this book up. I've always been a fan of dystopian novels (Anthem by Ayn Rand; The Trial by Kafka; The Giver, Gathering Blue, & Messenger by Lois Lowry, etc.) and Fahrenheit 451 did not disappoint: water/fire imagery, book burning, television and other forms of media taking over the world. I'm very excited for the first Bookclub Vlogbrothers' video and will probably reread bits of the novel when that time comes. Definitely read this one rather quickly and would like a bit more time to englishmajor* it.
*A new verb. Definition: to close read, study, analyze, and think about texts, film, theater, music, etc etc as an English major would.
Favorite Passages & Quotes:
"'Well,' she said, 'I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane. Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.'"
"'But most of all,' she said, 'I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.'"
"For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death,"
"'There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.'"
"'We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"
"'Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.'"
"He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then, one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence, there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate opposite things, a third. And one day he would look back upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the start of the long journey, the leave taking, the going away from the self he had been."
"He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be enough."
"'When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; the was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was non one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed one.'
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looooove this! and I second the motion to add "englishmajor" to the list of acceptable verbs ;)
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