A Few Words on Ray Bradbury
Jun. 7th, 2012 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedsitter23I was a big Bradbury fan so I feel I need to say something about his recent passing.
I discovered Bradbury ain those all-important pre-teenage years, and I loved him.
I started with Martian Chronicles (which I did enjoy), but it was the entrancing Something Wicked this way comes and the short-story collection The Illustrated Man. Those books had a profound effect on me.
In my 20s, I tried Fahrenheit 451 but didn't really enjoy it. There are a couple of possibilities why I didn't like it. For starters, at that point in my life, there were a handful of books I gave up on. I think I was just too busy for reading. Another thought was that I had recently finished 1984 and that book may have stole some thunder from 451. In any case, it's quite likely that by the time I got to this book, i had seen and read similar stories that had been written since and were more to my liking or more modern.
You should know about me that my genre of choice growing up was speculative fiction. I was a huge fan of The Twilight and Bradbury. I have only in recent years, read or plan on reading the big Sci Fi names (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein). I also (except an occasional terry Brooks book) was never that much into Fantasy, despite spending much of my teenage years with devotees of JRR Tolkien and Fred Saberhagen.
I have through the years checked out some of the more recent Bradbury stuff. Like any writer with a similar CV, there has been nothing that captured my attention like those big "hits". That said, some of the short stories have been excellent, some were enjoyable, and some I could have skipped. Discussions I have had with others who grew up with Bradbury skew the same way.
In any case, he was a favorite writer as a teen and I will always appreciate that.
I discovered Bradbury ain those all-important pre-teenage years, and I loved him.
I started with Martian Chronicles (which I did enjoy), but it was the entrancing Something Wicked this way comes and the short-story collection The Illustrated Man. Those books had a profound effect on me.
In my 20s, I tried Fahrenheit 451 but didn't really enjoy it. There are a couple of possibilities why I didn't like it. For starters, at that point in my life, there were a handful of books I gave up on. I think I was just too busy for reading. Another thought was that I had recently finished 1984 and that book may have stole some thunder from 451. In any case, it's quite likely that by the time I got to this book, i had seen and read similar stories that had been written since and were more to my liking or more modern.
You should know about me that my genre of choice growing up was speculative fiction. I was a huge fan of The Twilight and Bradbury. I have only in recent years, read or plan on reading the big Sci Fi names (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein). I also (except an occasional terry Brooks book) was never that much into Fantasy, despite spending much of my teenage years with devotees of JRR Tolkien and Fred Saberhagen.
I have through the years checked out some of the more recent Bradbury stuff. Like any writer with a similar CV, there has been nothing that captured my attention like those big "hits". That said, some of the short stories have been excellent, some were enjoyable, and some I could have skipped. Discussions I have had with others who grew up with Bradbury skew the same way.
In any case, he was a favorite writer as a teen and I will always appreciate that.
