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Audiobook Review

Fahrenheit 451

By
Ray Bradbury
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average rating is 4 out of 5
Performance
average rating is 4 out of 5
Overall
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Excellent, Unforgettable, Best of the nest

Very good, thoroughly enjoyed, 

Good, Solid, Enjoyed many aspects

STAR RATINGS GUIDE

Tim Robbins does justice to this dystopian classic.

THE BIRDICT

💜 This is part poetry, part prose. A hybrid. It does make it harder to grasp at first because it doesn't follow a natural speech pattern. But once you get into it, it's mesmerising and I think it's all part of Bradbury's world building. Disturbed people for a disturbing world.

💚 The portrayal of human behaviour is unexpected and strange. It's boiled down to the barest emotions. It's unsettling, but also intriguing. It makes me do mental acrobatics and changes my perspective for the duration of the read.

🧡 I don't see this as a great work of commentary on society. I think it's brilliant as a dystopia and a literary exercise, but hardly subtle or nuanced.

💛 This was written just a few years after 1984. Oh to be a book reviewer at that time. I think my head would have exploded.

SQUAWKING THE TALK

🎧 Tim Robbins brings every ounce of his considerable acting chops to this performance. He reads this with a wistful, thoughtful quality broken only by Montag's fury. However, the female characters don't quite come through, which is always a problem for someone with a voice as deep as Robbins'.

🎧 I'd like to hear a lighter take on the narration of this. I think it could completely change the perspective. Less angry, more circumspect.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: SIMILAR AUDIOBOOKS

No spoilers for this one. Maybe next time!
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Fahrenheit 451

THE BLURB

Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future, narrated here by Academy Award-winning actor Tim Robbins.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. 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 then 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. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
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