Book Review: Fahrenheit 451

Gabe Karin     12/9/08

Fahrenheit 451

By: Ray Bradbury

I think that Fahrenheit 451 is only for people that like slow moving and science fiction books. Sometimes it is hard to understand what the author is saying. But overall this book is pretty good. So I would recommend this book to some readers, but not everyone.

This book is about a fireman in the future who has to burn books. It’s kind of ironic there is a fireman named Guy Montag and he has to burn books instead of putting out fires. He goes to people’s houses to burn their books, their houses, and sometimes even them because they are so passionate about their books. In the beginning of the book Montag meets this girl named Clarisse McClellan. She tells Montag about her ideas of the world and all the rules about books. She likes to think about what things were like before. It is kind of cool because her ideas are about our time and it is interesting to see what they think our world is like.

He also meets an old man named Faber. Faber helps him get more people to read books. Because Faber is old, he has seen many things in his lifetime, because of this, Montag knows he is intelligent enough to help him. The other main character is his wife Mildred. She is a very depressed person and she follows all the rules. She never questions why things are the way they are. Whenever Montag says something that he shouldn’t be saying because he could get arrested, she takes like thirty sleeping pills. One time she almost died because she took too many pills.

Then there is Montage’s boss, who’s name is Beatty. He is the meanest person in the book. He will do anything to stop people from reading books. Towards the end of the book he was yelling at Montag and telling him all this stuff that is ridiculous. However, Montag still backed himself up with quotes from the books he read. Beatty has an electric hound that can find books. In the beginning of the book the hound already can sense that he is reading books and starts growling at Montag. Beatty is the one who really makes Montag mad because he has no heart. One of the people they burned was an old lady. He wanted to burn her, but Montag wanted to try to talk to her and convince her to come out. In the end, she ended up lighting herself on fire. That incident was what made Montag start reading books.

As you can see this book is pretty good and I would recommend it. But like I said before I wouldn’t recommend it to people who don’t like science fiction books or slow moving books. Sometimes you have to think about what the author is saying because in the beginning of the book it is hard to understand.