A story about books or about the fact that there should be no more books. Guy Montag is a fireman in this apocalyptic world where books are forbidden because they make you unhappy. Knowledge is no longer power, or maybe, if everyone has knowledge, then the leaders will have less power. In this new world, firemen light the fires, burn whole houses with their inhabitants if they find books inside. One day, Montag can’t bear his life, his job any longer, and so he becomes the one to be burnt, destroyed, killed. As often in dystopian novels, the plot is futuristic, unreal, but just close enough to what could maybe happen, what could be possible. It is all at once frighting and fascinating. Everybody should have read this book in their life.
“There was a damn silly bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we are doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.”