Happy New Year everyone!! Our January read was Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson, coming up next for February. Copies of this title are limited, so, if you don't need a copy, would you mind letting us
know? It helps us be more efficient in book distribution~ thanks in advance for your help!
*Announcement* We are now encouraging our members to start thinking about next year's reading list! We'd like to know if anyone would like to switch around the dedicated categories (currently, we have 5 dedicated categories: Young Adult, Memoir, Minnesota Author, Mystery and Classic)~ we could replace a genre with another, or eliminate a genre altogether and leave the other 4, or we could do away with dedicated categories completely and go back to reading the top 12 books voted in in the end. We're interested in your thoughts, and we'd also like you to be thinking about all the good books you'd like to nominate this next go round!
Tentatively, the plan is to have all the nominations submitted to Susan or myself by our March 12th book club meeting. You can call us, email us, leave them in the comments below, or drop your nominations off with anyone at the front desk at the library between now and March 12th. After the March 12th meeting, we'll get the nomination ballots sorted and out to each of you ASAP, and then plan to vote at the April 9th meeting. We'll then get the winners organized and get the new reading schedule squared away... and off we go! Whew!
Without further delay!
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
We were a little all over the place with this read, but we also were in a bit of a collective agreement at the same time. On the one hand, the group could agree that there was a time and a place for Mr. Bradbury's writing. One member added that they struggled with the writing until they thought of it more as poetry, and then it began to flow better. Several members said they had read Fahrenheit 451 thirty plus years ago and remember liking it much better then than they did this time through it... they couldn't say why. It was said this book had a prophetic touch regarding our ever increasing interest and dependency on technology.
On the other hand, there was heavy criticism for the writing. It was disjointed, awkward and seemed to slog on and on. No one could point to a character that they particularly liked or didn't find superficially constructed. Some members struggled to finish the book, others left it lay after only a few pages in. The story was dark and void and left you feeling forlorn all the way to the end... which couldn't come fast enough for a select few.
Do you have anything to add? We'd love to hear from you down below! 👇
Did you love Fahrenheit 451? Fans of the book also enjoyed, 1984, by George Orwell, How to Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. All of these titles are available within the Viking system~ reserve your copy today!
Would we
recommend this to a friend to read?
"NO"
Would we
recommend this to another book club for discussion?
"NO"
