Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury ; read by Christopher Hurt.— [Ashland] : Blackstone Audiobooks, 2005.

1 audio file (73998 KB) : (5 hr., 9 min.)

Unabridged

Downloadable audio file

Title from title screen

Requires OverDrive Media Console

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

ISBN: 9780786153107 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)

1. Book burning -- Fiction. 2. Censorship -- Fiction. 3. Political fiction. 4. Science fiction.

813.54

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, and he enjoys his job. But he has a secret dread hidden in the ventilation ducts above his ceiling. Lately he thinks that his hands are betraying him. They keep snatching and hiding the things he’s supposed to burn. One day he encounters an eccentric teenaged girl on the way home from work. What she says begins to worry him. He’s not sure why. But things are not right. His wife has attempted suicide several times, but she doesn’t want to talk to him about it. She does not want to believe that it happened. She just wants to watch “The Family” on the wall-sized television. She just wants to be happy and normal.

Listening to this books decades after first reading it, I was surprised by how good the writing is and how well Bradbury’s 1953 vision of the future has stood the test of time. What he had to say then is as relevant now as it was in the midst of the McCarthy era and the beginning of television. Montag’s turbulent and painful transformation from book burner to truth seeker is well wrought by both author and reader.

This edition includes an afterword by the author in which he describes the alternative versions of the book including Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film and his own stage adaptation, and his emphatic reasons why he has not altered the novel to fit current sensibilities.

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