Farenheit 451
by Jorge Luis Borges, Lucia Lorenzini
20% recommend76% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Dystopian novel about a future where books are burned, valued for its vivid, unsettling vision of society and for making readers look differently at the modern world; often called more prescient than 1984.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
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…by Michael Pollan - a lot of already known and rehashed info on psychedelics Lost City of the Incas by Hirham Bingham - Yale professor who discovered Machu Pichu. Good history of the Incas and region Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbuy - Classic! 2041 by Kim Stanley Robinson - NYC underwater in the future. A bit of a let down compared to his Mars series Shiver by Junji Ito - short stories from the king of Japanese horror…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗…story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King) Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky) Frankenstein (Shelley) Brave New World (Huxley) Farenheit 451 (Heinlein) Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt) A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt) The Machine Stops (Forster) Heart of Darkness (Conrad) Starship Troopers (Heinlein) The Jungle Book (Kipling) Lost in the Barrens…
on “Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?” ↗…once in high school, but it's high time to re-read it. What are some books you find your self going back to repeatedly (or want to)? My list: - Domain Driven Design - Ray Bradbury's short stories and Farenheit 451 - George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier - Descent into Hell - LotR, the Hobbit, and Narnia - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Psalms, Job, James - The Rare Jewel…
on “Read Fewer Books” ↗…current fear of the Mexican border that has so bolstered Trump's popularity, as well as the ramifications of having a country full of veterans who don't have any medical support or care? Read this book. Farenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Handmaid's Tale - Much better and scarier than any news clipping today about the possible future path for government interference in thought and action. Takes things to their logical…
on “Ask HN: What good books have you read in 2016?” ↗Farenheit 451. It made me look at the things we have in the world today differently. I personally think it came closer than 1984 at predicting the future. The attitudes of the general society in that world reminded…
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗…themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it. It reminds me of Farenheit 451 in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it. That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we…
on “Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?” ↗…discussion that politics should stay out of art, or that art should be apolitical, or that politics in art is pandering/bad. I feel that the selection of politics in art is actually quite specific- 1984, Farenheit 451, Ayn Rand's works are political with esteem. But works in a distinctly diverse voice are often chagrined for it- the new star wars stuff, the new star trek stuff (even when the old star trek stuff, which…
on “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on what it means to be “an African writer”” ↗…Galaxy" is utterly brilliant, and is deserving of a place on a top-10 scifi novels list. I enjoyed "Foundation" and "I Robot" as a kid. Not sure if I'd still like them now, decades later. Likewise for "Farenheit 451" and "Ender's Game". I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged", but I did read "The Fountainhead", which amounted to a very long-winded statement of Ayn Rand's philosophy with two-dimentional characters serving…
on “Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read” ↗In the entire concept, or just the degree of importance? Lets take the example of Farenheit 451, wikipedia [1] suggests an evolution (at least) in Bradbury's own interpretation of his own book: "In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the…
on “The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz” ↗Whenever I hear of right-to-repair I'm reminded of Farenheit 451 - one of often missed points that Bradbury made was that it was the willingness of the people in society to ditch books and information ; it was about populist mandate, not fascist overreach. With right-to-repair,…
on “We Fix: A DIY Manifesto (2014)” ↗Ray Bradbury did this with Farenheit 451. He did a small demo with all the key aspects and then made the novel. You can do a lot of these small "demos" or short stories and save them for a future novel. Or instead write them together and make…
on “How to Start a Novel” ↗…inevitable that someone like that would end up mediating "friendship" for the rest of the world, but come on). What you're talking about reminds me of the groups that got together to share memorized books, in Farenheit 451. I'm already a smoker so I know how to cut 75% of the world out of my potential-new-friends & dating pool... cutting out social media users isn't that hard. I don't want to see the preview if it ruins…
on “Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."” ↗…of the world" a thing we choose to value? Really, this is Ray Bradbury foisting his luddism and his value structure on people that have moved on from books, moved on from the slow life he idolized in Farenheit-451, and moved on from him. That woman was interacting with a human, in one of the many ways humans have invented for interacting with each other, from radio to television to film to Facebook to Twitter to…
on “Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots” ↗Ha! though 'Farenheit 451' would have made for an even more perfectly ironic incident, had Amazon erased it instead (that book was the first thing I thought of when I heard that Amazon was making a reader called Kindle.)
on “Any way to find a lost Kindle inside a house?” ↗…would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses. I'd pay for that! ;) Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
on “Epic Games just bought a North Carolina mall for its new headquarters” ↗