Nothing like the disappointment of going into a book expecting it to become a new favourite and ending by rating it two stars... Sorry to everyone who said it was their favourite book when I started reading it - it still is your favourite, just not mine!
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Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I of course appreciated the message Bradbury was putting across: the danger of people not reading; the rise of all-pervasive media which basically brainwashes; basically, the importance of books.
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But the pacing, the characters and even the writing just didn’t click with me. It finally started picking up around 100 pages in, I enjoyed the parts involving the escape & meeting up with the other underground literature lovers, but then it all went back downhill with the ending. I also couldn’t connect with Montag and I’ve already forgotten the other characters’ names. And unless the dialogue is exceptionally well written, I’ve always preferred novels that rely on first-person, introspective monologues (not sure that’s the word I’m looking for but you get my drift) and lots of narrative rather than continuous pages of speech.
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I’ll just leave it at that, fairly short but sweet from me which is unheard of! But I’m definitely not writing off Bradbury because of this - I’ll definitely be trying Something Wicked and Dandelion Wine!