Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
My apologies to Mr Bradbury but I didn't like this book any more as an adult than I did when reading it in high school though I appreciate the artistry of the work. It is well written, inarguably gripping, has an undeniable point of view and certainly has kept the conversation on censorship going for more than 60 years. There are just two thoughts in this book, or rather between the covers as one is part of the Coda not the story itself. "It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away." That is a lesson we should all take to heart during childhood and cling to throughout our lives. The other, "...do not insult me with your beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or shape into a fist, my lungs to shout or whipser with. I will not go gently unto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book." In much the way of the wanderers at the end of Fahrenheit 451 we are all our own book and must find the inner strength to never allow outside influences to edit our story in ways that leave us but empty covers on dusty forgotten shelves waiting to be burned.
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