Created by AcademicEarth.org
Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite dystopian novels (Brave New World is probably my favorite).
The video above is a nice little synopsis of the novel and it’s major themes. The entire book encapsulated in 2 minutes and 35 seconds. Like a whole meal in tablet form from the Jetsons. Its creator sent me the link and asked me to share, which I encourage everyone else to do as well.
The video got me to thinking about the novel and thinking about reading it again. I can’t remember if I read it when I was 13 when I read 1984 and Brave New World for the first time, or whether I read it later, possibly in college. However, one of the nice things about having too many books (which really means I don’t have enough book shelves) is that I was able to find a copy in less than a minute.
It also got be thinking about Bradbury as a writer of short seminal novels – Fahrenheit 541, Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine. Technically Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine are unified short story collections, but the thought that occurred to me is that these novel are an inspiration to a new writer like myself – to create something that is not simply entertaining, but a lasting work that that will speak to readers about core human issue decades in the future.
So, in the interest of inspiring myself, I’ll add 451 to the top of the reading pile and the film to the movie queue. Below is a little collage of the novel’s covers I created for fun. I always think it interesting to see how a popular novel’s cover changes over time, reflecting the design ideas popular culture at the time.
