Brave New World & Fahrenheit 451: Mini Reviews

Hey everyone! I thought I’d share some mini reviews on books that I’ve read recently. 🙂 I’d love to hear your thoughts on these books. 🙂

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Brave New World is an incredibly creepy peek into what our future is becoming. On the surface, the world looks amazing. Everyone is happy and carefree. Everyone can do whatever he wants, with whoever he wants, whenever he wants. On the surface, there are no rules or restrictions. Everyone is free. Everyone seems happy on the outside, but underneath, there is sadness, pain, and despite the fact that everyone is always together aloneness.

The world isn’t as it was intended to be. People are cloned in mass numbers to be used for factory work. Their only value is in the things that they can do. Everyone is conditioned from childhood – they have no choice what they believe, and no chance to make up their own minds on anything. It is put in their brains for them and they are deemed dangerous if they have different ideas.

John the Savage was such an interesting character. He was considered an utter barbarian, a freak, a monster to the “wonderful” world that he had lived outside of his whole life. And yet, he had more morals than, I think, any of us today have.

“Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?” asked Bernard.
The Savage nodded. “I ate civilization.”
“What?”
“It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added, in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”

His beliefs were confronted at every turn and he fought so hard against not becoming like the rest of the world. He failed. *SOBS* No spoilers, but my goodness, the ending…I finished the book and just sat there in disbelief, my heart crying for him. Because I know how hard it is to be alone and how hard he tried, how much he failed, and the utter regret and remorse that comes along with that. *SOOOOBS INTO LAP*

This book made me think. A lot. As weird and outlandish as it seems at times, this is not all science fiction. Give it time and I see our world becoming this. We have got to fight against – not necessarily technological advancement, but against dehumanizing people. We have to remember that everyone is made in God’s image and that we are all valuable to him, not simply machines made to work.

CW: an undressing scene in great detail, sexual acts thought about and described (not very graphic), suicide, self-harm, violence, language, some racism, abuse, drug addictions and drug overdose.

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I expected this book to be a lot better than it was. It is the story of a futuristic world where firemen’s job is to burn books and to start fires instead of putting them out. Guy lived a normal life until he met a neighbor with strange, wild ideas of a world where there was real family, real community and where people can read books.

All in all, it felt very simplistic and old. The technology was, well, I guess right for that time but is rather outdated now and it seemed like there was a strange mixture of futuristic and old technology that just felt muddled.

Three-quarters of the story was slow and boring. Nothing happened fast. I enjoyed seeing Guy’s heart change and his eyes open to the problems of the world he was living in. But other than that?
The ending was also awful in my opinion. It worked with the story, but it was just…it seemed like the easy way out. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll just say that Guy lost everything (*spoiler* including his wife, his home, everything!) and he didn’t seem particularly sad about it. Like at all. It annoyed me.

I think the book makes several good points on our current culture and our society, but all in all, it was rather weak and wasn’t nearly as well thought out as books like 1984 or Brave New World.

CW: suicide attempt, a woman is burned to death with her books, murder, drug and alcohol use.

~Hattush