I read
Fahrenheit 451, and I loved it. The story takes place in a dark near future, where reading is forbidden. Montag, a fireman, is in charge of burning books, which have become useless, bland and discriminating. Indeed, in front of the growing number of minorities to respect, the authors started to censor themselves, to be the least hurtful possible. Books lost their interest, and people started to stop reading them. The technology has also clearly evolved, and people find themselves sitting in front of the television, without any intellectual or cultural input. Books have become a danger, because they take people away from facts, from work, from the real world. Books are false. And this is what Montag is supposed to be fighting against. But, as he got to know a neighbor, Clarisse, he will start to wonder about the world around him, about this ban, about his happiness. "Are you happy", asked by Clarisse, is what will make him become aware of what is wrong. During a fire, where he attends the burning of a woman who refused to leave her house in flames, with the aim of setting fire to the books inside, he steals a book. He begins to read for the first time and wants to do everything to protect this book, as well as others that he has been stealing for more than a year. He is finally discovered by the fire captain, Beatty, under the denunciation of his wife, Mildred, and he is charged with burning the books he possesses. He eventually finds himself chased through the city, after killing Beatty and other firemen with a flamethrower, and finds refuge on the other side of a river, in a small group of men on the bangs of society, also rejected. They proclaim themselves as the guardians of the books, having the ability to hold them by reading them only once. At the same time, war breaks out in the city. The book ends with the small group walking, Montag in the lead, to the North, trying to help others.
I really enjoyed this book. I really like dystopias in general. I find that it really gives a new vision of a world that could be ours, if things were to go wrong. In this book, we can see a strong criticism of technologies, which "dumb down" the population. All means of forming an opinion are outlawed, and only concrete facts are of interest. People find themselves disinterested in everything around them. Mildred, Montag's wife, is a good example. In these days, nothing is really interesting. She gets up, she eats, she works, she takes sleeping pills, but she has no interest in having activities with her husband, and she has no interest in anything outside of her daily routine. When Montag tells her about the lady burning alive in his house, Mildred sees it as a common occurrence, not worth caring about. People have almost lost their taste for life. They are content to follow the government, to obey it without thinking. And those who go out of this way are considered criminals, and the population even helps to arrest them without really asking questions. That's why I really found this book interesting. Even though it says otherwise with the ban on reading, people have no free will, no freedom. They have a semblance of it, but in truth just look like bodies with no thought inside. So I highly recommend this book, it is very well written, it shows a dark and scary future, where I would absolutely not want to live.
Coline