Tag Archives: bradbury

my five favorites — classics

Another list of favorites. This time the clas­sics have their turn.
I have restricted myself to choos­ing five, but really…that is not enough, I know. Still, for the sake of not mak­ing my list two whole pages, here are my picks.

1. Pride and prej­u­dice — Jane Austen: who doesn’t know the story of Eliz­a­beth Ben­net and Mr Darcy? The best love story of all times.

2. Rebecca — Daphne du Mau­rier: a haunt­ing story with a twist of two women strug­gling for the atten­tion of one man.

this is a pre­view of my five favorites — clas­sics. read the full post (147 words & 1 image, esti­mated 35 secs read­ing time)
August 11, 2009 – 11:30 | by eb | posted in classics | tagged , , , , , , | 17 views comments (0)

fahrenheit 451 — ray bradbury

5 stars

Guy Mon­tag is a fire­man; not a fire­man that extin­guishes fires, but one that ignites them. He lives in a time (some­where in the future) when hav­ing books is ille­gal. When the peo­ple who own them are found out, the fire brigade is being called to burn down the house together with the books. Guy is happy with his job until on one call a woman refuses to leave her books and burns together with them. On that occa­sion Guy grabs a book with him; there must be some­thing in books if peo­ple don’t want to leave them even when that means their death. From that moment on his entire life turns upside down and he has to make some dif­fi­cult choices and decisions.

this is a pre­view of fahren­heit 451 — ray brad­bury. read the full post (206 words & 1 image, esti­mated 49 secs read­ing time)
May 1, 2007 – 09:43 | by eb | posted in classics, recommendations, science fiction, thrillers | tagged , , , , | 3,576 views comments (5)

burning books

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!

this is a pre­view of burn­ing books. read the full post (324 words & 2 images, esti­mated 1:18 mins read­ing time)
April 25, 2007 – 08:48 | by eb | posted in book talk | tagged , | 3,392 views comments (0)