"If a Book is Well Written, I Always Find it too Short" ~ Jane Austen

Monday, January 26, 2015

FARENHEITH 415

  It takes a person approximately five seconds to form an opinion on someone. In those moments, we take in everything from the said person's hair and clothes to body language and facial features. Back in the day of our long forgotten ancestor's, this was a survival mechanism, intended to provide the human race with a better chance at survival. At that time, first impressions were literally a matter of life and death.  

 What I'm getting at is that it's instinctive to form such quick opinions of things and people around us. It is in our nature to, in essence, judge book by its cover. And try as we might to fight it, we will always have a predisposition of a book before we even get passed the cover.

Try as I might, that's what I did with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I assumed the reading would be a long, painful process before I even finished the first paragraph. Too bad first impressions are sometimes right.

The main character so far, the firefighter with a strange obsession with a 15 year old girl, gets on my nerves. The girl, though normal by today's standards, just seems to constantly annoy me. Mildred needs serious help for her depression and materialistic greed, and the chief fireman obviously knows more than he's letting on.

In all honestly, he characters probably aren't that bad, I can really see myself growing to like the strange fireman, I can tell how much he cares for his wife, and I'm curious to met the girl's uncle. I have a feeling he'll be important later. It's Bradbury's writing style that irks me.

I can't exactly say what it is about the way he arranges his words on the paper, just something about the way the sentences for the story makes my eye twitch. I often find this is the case when dealing with great literary classics such as Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The way they write is not what I'm used to, nor what I like. I'm not afraid to admit that I am a picky person, but I am trying to be more open minded.

Who knows, maybe by the end of Fahrenheit, Bradbury's style will have grown on me. And while first impressions can't be changed, opinions can.

















No comments:

Post a Comment