Saturday, 15 October 2011

"Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Ray Bradbury

I have vague memories of an '80's movie adaptation of "Something Wicked This Way Comes".  Mostly I remember the greem mist and creepy carousel.  The movie came out when I was two, so that's about as far as my memory goes on that one.  It was enough, though, to give me an extra sense of anticipation when reading Ray Bradbury's original "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

"Something Wicked This Way Comes" is classic Ray Bradbury.  It has a story and interesting characters, but even more than that it has a mood, a vision of the world, that is fascinating.  He takes a seemingly simple story with children for main characters and makes it both child-like and utterly adult.  If you're only going to read one Ray Bradbury book (and if you read one I don't know why you wouldn't read more), then this wouldn't be the first one I'd recommend.  But if you're going to read several Ray Bradbury books, this is an enjoyable novella.

In other news, it seems that my list of Bradbury's 59 books, taken from his own official website, is lacking.  I think the list includes his original novels and collections, but there are more.  My sister is reading "A Pleasure to Burn", a collection of Bradbury's stories and writings that culminated in "Fahrenheit 451".  On Amazon I also found these books that aren't on my Ray Bradbury list:
  • "Where Everything Ends" (reprints of previous novellas, plus a new short story not in other collections)
  • "I Live by the Invisible" (poetry new and old)
  • "Summer Morning, Summer Night" (combination of his small town stories, some are reprinted from other collections and some were previously unpublished)
  • "We'll Always Have Paris: Stories" (short story collection reprinted just last year)
  • "Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews" (Sam Weller's interviews of Bradbury)
Maybe I'll never get to the end of Bradbury's writings...and just maybe I'm ok with that.

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