the other book review

A cou­ple of days ago I started the book Fahren­heit 451 by Ray Brad­bury. A clas­sic I didn’t know about until I saw it in a Ger­man book­store for a good price. And although the genre is described as sci­ence fic­tion, I couldn’t resist buy­ing it; mainly because of the theme of the book: burn­ing books. The time in the book is set in the future when fire­men don’t put out fires, but start them, in the name of the gov­ern­ment, in houses of peo­ple who own Eng­lish books. Why exactly I don’t know yet, I’m just not that far in the book, but only the fact that peo­ple aren’t allowed to own books is intrigu­ing me. I can’t imag­ine a world with­out books. What would hap­pen if I’m not allowed to ever read a book again, not being per­mit­ted to own any books? Could I live with that? Would I have the guts to own my books ille­gally in a hid­den base­ment or attic?
I know of the book burn­ings dur­ing WW II, and I do think that books can help in form­ing cer­tain ideas and ideals, but I don’t think books can be that dan­ger­ous that they have to be for­bid­den. The burn­ing of books says more about the ones that order it, then about the books them­selves. Why should you be afraid of books when you have noth­ing to hide, or when you believe in peo­ple?
Well, as you notice, books help you pon­der about things, big things, small things. Books help you escape from real­ity and get your imag­i­na­tion going for as long as you like.
I just love books!

P.S. Just a short quote from Fahren­heit 451: ‘There must be some­thing in books, things we can’t imag­ine, to make a woman stay in a burn­ing house; there must be some­thing there. You don’t stay for noth­ing.’ (page 58 in my edi­tion from Voyager)

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