A meta-review of my 'Fahrenheit 451' review
In 2014, I wrote a “review” of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. You can view an archived copy. What I wrote did not age well.
Apples to oranges
The review begins with a confusing comparison between Fahrenheit 451 and Kindle e-readers. I made vague assertions that physical books are better than Kindle, flammability concerns aside. It then devolved into a proto-boomer rant about how social media prevented us from being mindful, and how people being glued to their phones was the end of the world.
Missing the point
In retrospect, I was trying too hard to show off my faux-hipster bibliophile credentials – so much so that I could only manage a superficial reading of the text. My understanding of the material was surface-level at best. I now know – thanks to major events and the passage of time – that Fahrenheit 451 was never about burning books. The central theme of the story was the censorship of ideas deemed dangerous by those in power, not the destruction of books themselves. Books were simply the medium, it was the ideas within them that were outlawed and censored and destroyed.
It wasn’t until 2016 or ’17 that the theme clicked for me. Why I didn’t go and change what I’d already written I do not know. But it is funny watching me parkour from ranting about social media to deforestation to climate change to people being busy with their lives. It is emblematic of an idealistic early adulthood – the ideals were still strong and I was still figuring out how it all worked. All my ideas were half-baked – not given enough time to gestate – but I put them out anyway. Ironically, putting thoughts out is something I struggle with now.
Honorable mentions
Parts I found especially funny or cringe-inducing.
In our age of digital publishing and consumption and where anyone with an Internet connection can become a journalist overnight, …
The irony of me stating this on a personal blog I spun up in 30 minutes was lost on me.
Of course, I don’t want this post to be a rant, they serve no purpose after all.
I then proceeded to rant my heart out.
It’s not that I’m against the Kindle. I just prefer the feel of a physical book in my hands, the flutter of paper as I turn it, to watch the story unfold in my head, the smell of paper, possibly older than myself.
That second sentence is a crime against humanity. I have changed from someone who waxed poetic about physical books to someone who does the majority of their reading on an E-Ink reader. Multiple factors converged and shaped this change of heart – ridiculous markups on dead-tree editions of books, storage, portability, environmental impacts, you name it.
We are shifting from physical books to digital reading devices like the Kindle and Kobo, even as the rate of deforestation skyrockets.
For an essay that has “Kindle” in the title, I spent next to no time explaining the link between Fahrenheit 451 and e-readers. Almost as if I forgot what I was supposed to write about.
In Conclusion
I closed the original post with a corny line about how being extremely online would blind us to the growth of authoritarian regimes and pave the way for book-burning. In the end, being extremely online did lead to the outright censoring of ideas – but only because of the slow and steady rise of far-right, fascist politics. The authoritarian regimes that outlawed ideas and ideas grew in plain sight after all.