Anyway, I picked it up at the library this week and read it. I never really knew much about the plot. I only knew it had something to do with fire and book burning. Well come to find out it's about the future, but the future is NOW. The book was written in the early 1950s and describes a future where people are so entranced with television and media that they no longer read books. In fact, books are illegal. Knowledge and discussion is frowned upon. It's gotten to the point where if someone is suspected of having books in the home, the fire department is called and the firemen actually burn the house down. Yes, in this world firemen start fires instead of extinguishing them. Well, our protagonist is a fireman who has been secretly hiding books in his home. He begins to question the world around him and this gets him into all kinds of crazy trouble.
I think if I read this in high school or college I wouldn't have been able to fully appreciate it. We are being consumed by television and media. Before getting rid of it, I used to zone out in front of my TV for hours with the best of them. Then I would rub my weary eyes at the end of a Saturday and wonder where the time went. A perfectly good day.....wasted. The older I get, the more I realize how this lack of original thought and discussion is affecting our society in a negative way. We're simply becoming one large mass of group-think much like the society in this book. It's eerie to see that sixty years ago it was imagined that this was the road we were headed down.
This is a classic that I would definitely recommend because it is dead-on with the depiction of our dystopian 21st century and it advocates a questioning intellect.
