Montag’s change in manner arouses the suspicion of his boss, Captain Beatty, a fire chief armed with slippery arguments and his Mechanical Hound, an evil robot dog. In turn, he tries to shake his wife Mildred out of her addiction to the state media, but with no success. Montag soon questions his participation in this system after conversations with Clarisse McLellan, a free-spirited neighbor who questions his way of life. In the place of books, the state offers mindless programs distributed through earbud-style “seashells” and wall-to-wall “parlor” TV screens. Montag lives in an unspecified American town, in an unspecified future where a totalitarian government controls the population’s minds by burning all books. “It was a pleasure to burn.” That’s the novel’s great first line and our introduction to Guy Montag, a fireman who loves to burn books. But I soon realized that Bradbury, writing at the height of the Cold War, was not chiefly concerned with the destruction of books. I did find it ironic, at first, to be listening to a book about burning books, as if I was somehow contributing to their spontaneous combustion. I could fill another gap in my knowledge of the classics-without having to judge the book by any cover. When The Banner’s Mixed Media editor asked if I wanted to review Fahrenheit 451 as an audiobook, I accepted immediately. While I was intrigued, the garish flames on the cover turned me off, and I never read Bradbury’s novel. “He’s actually burning books,” my brother explained, adding that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which books will spontaneously combust. The copy we had at home of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 showed a fireman in front of a raging fire.

When I was a teen, I definitely judged a book by its cover.

Fahrenheit 451 audible