Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 is written so poetically, I was compelled to read it out loud (which I did for the first 20 pages, until my partner got tired of hearing me talking even more than usual).   Ray Bradbury is a passionate writer;  you can tell by the way his sentences flow so beautifully that he throws himself into each one of them.  I’m always amazed to find such romance coming from a male author. The story was short, yet gripping from start to finish.   It’s a utopian story about the future of our society, where we’ve become so overstimulated it becomes a crime to read, because books incite thought in our already overstuffed brains.  In the Afterword Bradbury gives examples of how this is happening today, with censorship and political correctness killing our imaginations.   

Here’s a brief excerpt, so you can see the beauty of Bradbury’s style:

How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?  What incredible power of identification the girl had;  she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began.  How long had they walked together?  Three minutes?  Five?  Yet how large that time seemed now.  How immense a figure she was on the stage before him;  what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body!  He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink, and if the muscles of his jaw stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would. 

Once I’m done with this list, I’ll definitely be coming back to Bradbury, but for now I’m moving on to Great Expectations.

The Great Gatsby

For the record, The Sun Also Rises ended just as anti-climatically as the rest of the story suggested it would, and I took absolutely nothing from it except a decent description of the Running of the Bulls, which I found entertaining.  Otherwise, the story ended with the main character and the leading lady both denying their true feelings, and being in the exact same position they were in at the start of the book.  Big disappointment.

I’m moving on to The Great Gatsby.  I know nothing about this book, except that Mia Farrow played the lead female role in the movie, and she was the voice of The Last Unicorn, which is enough to make me happy.  I’m only about 10 pages in, and already I love Fitzgerald’s writing style.  It’s rich with description and he immediately made me fall in love with the main characters. 

This is a short book, I should be done tomorrow.

Edit: Nov. 9, 2009

Finished The Great Gatsby tonight.  It had a tragic ending, not at all what I expected.  It was a very short book, (though this may be because I just finished 800-page Anna Karenina), but I didn’t feel there was enough time to get to know Gatsby before the ending came.  I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I will just recommend that if you haven’t read this book yet, you definitely should.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but having the image of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow really helped establish the characters for me.  In a way, Gatsby reminds me of so many people I know, constantly “entertaining,” but developing no real friendships.  The love story is the part that really tore me up though.  I have such high expectations for passionate love, and this is the second book in a row that left me feeling empty about it.

Definitely going to read some more Fitzgerald in the future though.

Anna Karenina – Part Deux

Finished!  Vertig!  I did NOT like this book!  I pushed myself through the last 300 pages, just so I could legitimately finish it, but even that was borderline torturous.  The book started out so romantically; it’s the story of two couples and their tumultuous relationships.  In a nutshell, the relationship that was built on pure passion ended in tragedy, and the one that was more logical seemed to flourish.  It almost feels like Tolstoy was following the times by refusing to allow an extra-marital affair to survive, and instead made Anna go mad in the end, taking her own life. 

I guess I have to give him credit for not letting everyone live happily ever after. 

This book has been regarded by some to be the “greatest novel ever written.”   It simply wasn’t that interesting to me, nowhere near the likes of Atlas Shrugged or Lolita. 

This quote summarizes Anna Karenina better than my words ever could: “The central theme of Anna Karenina is that a rural life of moral simplicity, despite its monotony, is the preferable personal narrative to a daring life of impulsive passion, which only leads to tragedy.”

And now, back to Gatsby.