Unimportant Musings

For what's supposedly a classic, and a short one at that, Fahrenheit 451 isn't really all a lot of people have hyped it up to be. The fact it took me a little over half this year to, with great relief, get to the last page should be testament enough to how invested I was not in the book. I hesitate, as my more knee-jerky side wouldn’t, to toss around words like “tedious” to “shitty" because I did enjoy the book when it took a merciful break from its more descriptive bits, which called for Herculean effort to wade through, for some pretty amazing dialogue. Certainly, there are sentences, if not whole paragraphs, which were arguably beautiful enough I could understand why some might praise the book for. The messages it warns about and promotes, considering their relevance today, can be sobering. But on the whole, Fahrenheit 451 could’ve been written far more excitedly, its story told less ploddingly, its characters given a little more depth, so I might’ve been moved to give at least one solitary fuck. Wishy-washiness aside, however, I know authors change with time, for better or worse, and given there are still other books he'd written, I haven't dismissed Ray Bradbury yet for this particular hiccup, which I’d as soon give someone a bucketful of sleeping pills as recommend to someone for their first Bradbury book.