The Martian Chronicles

It was irresistable, I had to buy this.  I opened it up and saw the first story Ylla and I just had to have it!

But the enthrallment pretty much stopped there...
Because I love Ray Bradbury so much, and because I love this book the best, I thought that this adaptation might be good. It is the authorised version which makes me wonder who else might have done something along these lines. There is something lacking however. Something that didn't translate as well from the written word to this graphic format. I still like it, I think it was well done, I especially liked the artists image of the Martians...it's just that the dialogue seemed a little chunky and arranged in such a way that it didn't flow as well as Bradbury's prose always has. Perhaps it was too difficult to do so, after all Bradbury was a master of metaphor. I still highly recommend this book, from a fangirl/collector's point of view, it will be placed amongst my Bradbury collection.

In Memoriam

It has been an emotionally charged year for me while I read Ray Bradbury.  I guess you could almost say that I dwelled too much on my own feelings of loss, but it was difficult to avoid such feelings when I was reminded again and again that he was gone, every time I read something that was so sentimental, something so very Ray.  If you understand him, it is very apparent in all of his work the absolute joy he had in life, in his very own life.  The mysteries he wrote (Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard For Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance) are vitally a self indulgence and an homage to his life, his acievements, his very soul.  You can see in them everything he ever was.  I won't attempt such a feat again as trying to read as many books of his as possible, as it was overwhelming in it's scope.  Add to that the grief of his passing and it was one very potent, emotional roller coaster ride.  
I will make a habit however of reading something every year.  I would like more than anything to just slow down a little and take the time to consider each story, write about them, even research them, just pull it apart in every way possible, giving to the story a concentrated attention that helps me to see everything it is and could be.  He has made an indelible mark on my life.  He is responsible in part for the kind of person that I am.  At isolated, rare moments in my life I have looked at the world through his eyes and believed in the beauty of and the joy in living that was his very own precious belief.  Can you blame me for loving him so much?

A Memory of Murder

Just when you think you have him figured out, he throws you through another loop and shares some golden oldies that surprise and shock by how macabre the stories are.  He has caught me by surprise before, so I shouldn’t have been too shocked by it.  Perhaps it is because it has been  distilled in to one great collection that makes it so potent.  Perfection!

The Cat's Pajamas

The Cat’s Pajamas is dedicated to Ray’s wife Maggie who passed away a few weeks before publishing.  The short story ‘The House’ must have been written for her once he could start writing again, the sentences within say so much about how he was feeling.
The rest are quite an eclectic collection, all with an almost crazy idea and an important message to them.  It is all a part of the world of Ray Bradbury, and a significant collection which I think I will re-visit often.

A Sentimental Journey

I could probably spend years of my life thinking and writing about the stories of Ray Bradbury, it would be the masters program of my dreams, studying, understanding, and re-imagining, the genius of the man.  From one standpoint, it is so simple to see what he planned for each book, why he assembled and reassembled such stories in this collection and that collection, and the greater joy of enjoying yet again a favourite story, in a new setting, adding nuances that were not there before, just because he wanted you to feel some other way before you re-read something of his.
There is so much to think about after each story, there are messages here, important ones, that I think he hoped we would understand and that would somehow change the way we thought about life.
With age, he just kept on improving, getting richer, more mature.  This collection proved this repeatedly, as he and his characters took a sentimental journey, having written this just ten years before his death.   This was the first time (after reading this book in 2002), that I started to dread the inevitable, that at any time he would no longer be with us, so I began treasuring everything written after that, knowing that it might be his last book, always hoping for just one more story.

A Medicine For Melancholy

A medicine for melancholy, an excellent theme for a book and a magical short story as well.  This collection is stunning because of the emotions it evokes.  One moment you are transformed by awe, romance, or beauty and the next moment/story you are jolted out of complacency by a story that impacts you to your very soul.  Amongst the beauty and the romance is cruelty, ignorance, and evil,  it’s a very potent cocktail, that needs to be drunk off fast, and then slowly digested, savouring all of the effects each flavour evokes (corny I know, but you can excuse me can’t you?  I have been reading Ray Bradbury after all!). 

I Sing the Body Electric

In true Bradbury style an homage is paid to Papa Hemingway in The Kilimanjaro Device.  A birthing procedure gone wrong, delivering up a baby from another dimension in Tomorrows Child?  A bizarre fight for a man in The Women. An artistic chicken in the Inspired Chicken Hotel, and what every assassin and attention seeker needs in Downwind From Gettysburg.
Yes, We’ll Gather at the River is a testament to change, and a lyrical Irish tale written to amaze and astonish (what on earth did I just read?) in The Cold Wind and the Warm.  Self-aware telephones in Night Call, Collect (Ray had an uncanny sense of how things would be in the future).
I Sing the Body Electric, a story so impassioned and bittersweet.  Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine is a very special homage to the great Charles Dickens and to the love of writing.  Heavy Set is just downright creepy (how did he do it?  I imagine him chuckling with impish glee whenever he wrote such stuff).  And in Henry the Ninth an unwillingness to let go of what is most important.
It’s a collection of stories about love, the many ways we love, the many things we love and in true Bradbury fashion, some alternatives to love.  It’s beautiful, it’s magic, it’s pure Ray Bradbury at his most loving.

A Sound of Thunder & Other Stories

This is a wonderful selection of Bradbury’s greatest short stories.  If you ever wanted to just buy the one book (though I personally would not be able to stop at just one book!) this would be a good contender because it has a broad spectrum of his many years of storytelling, covering his many periods or phases of literature.
While I began with The Martian Chronicles, and progressed from there to the rest of his space themed collections…and everything else he has ever written, this book would be a really good introduction for the novice Bradbury reader.  

The Toynbee Convector

It is really interesting to see what Ray Bradbury's focus was about later on in his very long life.  It all makes sense of course, an old love story, a long and enduring marriage, haunting memories from past wars, time-travellers, real or invented.  The theme for this book was time that has passed,  it is an homage to things long gone.   I  think the older Ray got the cheekier he became too (the story Junior being an excellent example of that! Only Ray would write a story about an eighty-two year old man's erection), and of course the man who discovered that his childhood fear of the bogeyman was not so unfounded after all, when he decided to go back and confront that fear.  Cheeky!

  

The Machineries of Joy

I am presented with points of view that I have never considered before:- Irish Catholic Priests in America faced with the unknowns of the birth of space travel.  A gaseous entity encountering humans for the first time on Mars.  A Hollywood monster-maker whose tyrannosarus rex becomes too lifelike.  The last family in America going on vacation.  The fears of a drummer boy about to go into battle.  Invasion through fungi.  The calamity of losing radio and television on a small town.  Indians seeing white men for the first time ever.   A sea captain still in mourning for his lost love.  The Day of Death in Mexico.   A pshychiatrist presented with an illustrated woman.  A son strangled by his mother.  An understanding of the worth of a true miracle.  The insanity of a murderous ventriloquist.  The beggar as a professional.  The obsession with death of an old spinster who has never really lived.  The hazards of success.  The importance placed in Mexico of a place to stay when you are dead.   An old man remembering a better way of life.   Irish competitiveness. I can safely say that I will never look at mushrooms the same way again...

The Small Assassin

Some favourite one-liners from The Small Assassin, the hooks that add oomph, that weave magic with words, those sentences that are so typically Ray Bradbury.

• Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell.

• She shuddered, a convulsive motion, like a fish trying to free itself from a deep-swallowed hook.

• There was a moment of green silence.

• He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where  his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

• If he tried to find another World beyond them, the trees wove themselves thick with the wind, to still his curiosity, to stop his eyes.

• It was a wonder when Grandma brandished silver shakers over the bird, supposedly sprinkling showers of mummy-dust and pulverised Indian bones, muttering mystical verses under her toothless breath.

• Beautifully, beautifully dead.

• There in the middle of the simple room sat the tombstone.

• It was the sensation of silence that the most notable aspect of the house.

• It was very convenient to die for Mr. Benedict.

• They took hold of Michael and pushed him out the window.

• The town is so quiet and far off, you can only hear the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.

• “He looks like a bottle of milk.”

R is For Rocket

I have been encouraged from time to time to write my own book.  I don't understand why.  I love to read books, I love buying books (especially hunting for treasure in the second-hand book stores), I love talking about books (without giving away too much unless you have read it and then the discussions can be very enthusiastic).   I will gleefully be as geeky as I can when it comes to anything about books (coffee mugs, t-shirts etc.,).  I just can't write them,  and this is why. 
I have no imagination.  How I would come up with a story or a plot or an adventure is beyond my ambitions.  The only thing I know about is my own life, and believe me, that would be a miserable thing to write or read about.  Why write when there is already so many amazing books out there?  I would rather spend my time reading them than writing them.
I'm grateful not everyone feels the same way as I do, and of course, ever so grateful that I grew up in an age that has so many great writers.  I don't know how many ways I can say this but I am just so glad that Ray Bradbury was born.  What an immense gift to the world, and to myself.  He takes me to so many different places, with so many different problems, each an experience so different from the last and all flavored with his enthusiasm and joy for the written word. Out in space, where he isn't limited to what might happen here on Earth, the ideas are just unfathomable, showing me that he was such a great writer, and how I never could be.

A Graveyard For Lunatics

For a fan, this kind of novel is a true and overwhelming delight...for lunatics!  I have been so crazy for Bradbury for such a long time that when a novel comes along, it is almost an overdose of wonderful and I switch from being overwhelmed to awestuck to feeling nutsy-koo-koo chapter by chapter.  I feel so blessed to have so much of his work, and I treasure every word ( I give each book a hug on completion...my first red flag that I must be going nuts), I'm not ashamed.  After all, how lucky am I at such an age to have been touched by greatness that has enriched my life so much?  I cannot do this justice so I recommend that you just read it for yourself, because Ray put it better than anyone.

The Golden Apples of the Sun

Since I don't feel that I should ramble on and on all of the time about how wonderful and marvellous and amazing Ray Bradbury's stories are I thought I would tell you instead about where he took me and who I encountered while I was reading this collection of short stories.
Starting with a lighthouse, I was scared silly by a dinosaur in love, chilled to the heart for a lone pedestrian (Fahrenheit 451 coming up!), cheered two gals on to a rocket, got creeped out in that Hitchcock kind of way, flew in  Chinese skies, became awestruck with Bradbury's genius as yet again he predicted someting not far from the truth (I cannot imagine what he must have felt!).  I read of two towns which battled by way of architecture, about embroidery as a means of prayer, seen the ugliness of black and white, heard the sound of thunder, been shown how limiting illiteracy really is, flowed around the world through an electrical wire, seduced peace and quiet, seen indecent exposure as a way of protest, all of the world in one filming lot, the worst garbage pick-up ever, the bewildering hormones of a girl, the boy who never grows up, and at the very last where no man has gone before for a handful of sunshine.  What a trip!

Death is a Lonely Business

 A dozen or so years ago, when I had first read this, I missed some pretty important things.  Naturally, I still enjoyed the book and the vivid imagery that practically every sentence illustrated... I just missed some things, references which this time around I picked up on because I have just recently re-read a few of his books so my memory was fresh.  I found new pleasures in an already heady book, which just blew things up to even greater proportions of fantastic. 
It was overwhelming.  Ray put so much of himself into this book that it was almost suffocating with his art.  I had to stuggle sometimes to keep on task with the story, because his metaphors were very thick on the ground, and I was distracted most of the time with the images of each one.   
It is such a gift to be enriched with such legends and all of his own making.  He truly was a master,  I am so grateful for every word and still grieve that there won't be any more.

Living Dead in Dallas

 This is book two of the Southern Vampires series, and the continuing adventures of Sookie Stackhouse.  Things get a little more complicated for Sookie this time, but she handles it with her usual intelligence, spunk and aplomb (I loved the part where she just stuck it to Portia Bellefleur and never gave her a single inch).  
There are two plots (story a and story b) and I just love how Harris has woven them together to make a really good story.    After reading the first book (which I had taken out of the library after  DS#1's brilliant, lovely and  beautiful girlfriend recommended it to me), I promptly went and bought the first eight books (sold in a convenient eight pack on Amazon.ca), and rapidly ripped through them. I am really fond of Sookie and her world so I am most anxious to see what will ultimately happen. This time around I am keeping an eye out for the little things and trying not to miss something because I was too eager to find out what happened the first time.  I am savoring all the moments.
The over-all story doesn't progress too far, but lots of things happen to keep it lively and Harris has a real talent for telling a story and keeping you interested which I think is rare (there are many series I have attempted which have just become so incredibly boring or far-fetched after a few books and you can just see that the author has over-extended themselves and lost the plot).
As usual the television show True Blood blew this book all out of proportion in an extremely stupid and pointless way.  It reminds me of the (ahem) 'storyline' to a porn movie, where the writers just sit down together and brainstorm on how they can optimize the sex or depravity to the utmost, and the more boobs and butts the better!  I hate what they have done to Sam's character, and to make something bad even worse, they destroyed Sookie's house which is such an anchor in the books.  I know that people really enjoy the show, and even Charlaine Harris has nothing but good things to say about it, but I'm just really glad that I read the books initially because I would not have given them a second thought if it had been the show I had encountered first.

*Spoiler Alert*  I am going to keep a tally of how many times the girl gets beaten up.  It was twice in the first book, once in this book...  I am amazed at how often she gets hurt by people, and so far it has been because of her involvement with vampires.

Long After Midnight

 Like I've said recently I haven't read a lot of Bradbury for a while for several different reasons and even when I have they have been pretty specific arrangements (all of a similar theme).   This one was a hodgepodge of whammy!  It is not an easy thing to blog about because this is a collection of short stories... how do you present that?  But I am compelled to put something down because I am still feeling it, so it must need to be said.  Coarsely put, it was a mindfrack.  This collection was so very easy to read, I transitioned from story to story with remarkable ease, not sinking too deeply into any one story, and not being able to put it down until I had finished the lot.  After I was done it was like a cumulative wallop to the body, some sentimentalism, affection, awe, humor, a stab of horror and then something sweet.  It was a lot to process all at once, and really overwhelming.  Read bit by bit or all at once, reading Bradbury is a poignant experience but it will be a while before I do it again.

On The Home Stretch

2013 signals the end of a fascinating story.  The Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris  is coming to an end at book thirteen.  I have followed this story with interest and the characters are my absolute favorites, I love the main protagonist Sookie Stackhouse.    Usually I don't hold much truck with series (lets face it there are so many out there now and some of them are so long winded that they have lost my interest before completion...Wheel of Time anyone?), and  there are the series that will just not ever end! (I shrink in horror from those).

Sookie Stackhouse's story is a hard one, and I have been impressed (for the most part) with how she has dealt with adversity.  Harris wrote her characters very well, I have a strong sense of what it's like to be a well brought up southern woman, complete with good manners, a strong backbone, and a determination to present a certain front to the rest of the world which has it's own 'old world' kind of charm.  I have always liked a story that has presented a strong southern woman as I admire them immensely (Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe).  I imagine that  Harris has inserted her own personal strength into her female characters, that makes them strong even after suffering as they have (and with a sense of humor too).  After reading all of her other books, and her blog, Harris impresses me with her  strength and intelligence. 

This next year I will be re-reading the whole series as part of my reading challenge for 2013 completeing them all in time for May 5th when the last Sookie Stackhouse story will be published.  I am a little sad to see her go, but at the same time it's a good thing that the story is ending (that line from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes "A lady always knows when to leave..." comes to mind).
I don't know how it will end, every book has been a surprise for me.  Sookie has had a few relationships which have caused her some pain (though she has always become stronger because of it), There's Bill who was her first lover, Sam who is her boss (he's on the list though they have never been together), Eric the Viking Vamp and the weretiger Quinn.   I know what I hope for, and it has actually been biasing what I have read so far this week.  I hope that Sookie will live happily ever after with Sam who can protect her, give her children, and grow old with her.  Not that these are his only good qualities, he has been in love with her for years, has supported her through all of her troubles, and consistently treated her with the greatest respect (and has always spoken his mind if he hasn't liked something she's done), which to me are the ingredients of a good marriage, and with the way that the last book Deadlocked ended, I am optimistic that Sam just might be Sookie's Happily Ever After.  Of course, Harris might have other ideas which is why this series has been so very good from start to almost finished.

I have just finished Dead Until Dark, my introduction to Sookie and her life in Bon Temps.  I have been thoroughly scrutinising every word because I don't plan on reading this series for a good long while and I want to savor every page.   There's interesting little tidbits everywhere which I have forgotten (or perhaps not noticed first time through because I am usually in a rush to find out what's happened), which incidentally support my Sam theories (it has been flavoring my opinions, but don't worry though... I know that Harris could easily go a whole 'nother way).

One influence that I do find rather annoying is the tv show.  I will state right now that I really don't like what they have done in True Blood.  This is not my picture of Sookie's life.   It is overdone, overblown and makes Sookie out to be a bit stupid and crass (which she certainly isn't), and the town of Bon Temps and the characters in it are over the top (waaaay over that top!).  I stopped watching it after the second season, realizing that the focus was on all of the bad stuff and the small stuff (like the sex etc.,).  And some of the characters from the book have had awful treatments and alterations which add an ugly bias of their own and take away from what has always been prevalent in Harris' books which is Sookie's tolerance and acceptance of everybody, no matter what type of person they are, whatever supernatural leaning or level of intelligence. Sadly, I have lost the picture in my mind of what I thought the characters used to look like  and the True Blood actors have imposed themselves in their place.  While I realize that certain story lines are impossible to put to screen, most of these embellishments are not necessary and frankly take away from what is, in my mind, the most important thing in the story, Sookie Stackhouse.

I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the series and will try to contain my excitement until May.  No matter what Harris decides to do in the end, whichever way she decides to go, I know that I am just going to love it!

Green Shadows, White Whale

This is one that I have never read!  When I was in my twenties and had first discovered Ray (The Martian Chronicles), I kept the local library busy bringing in through inter-library-loan every single book of Ray's that they had.  But this one eluded me, and I was pleasantly surprised to see what it actually was about.  I had always thought that since he had written the script for the movie with Gregory Peck in it, that it was a novelisation of the movie and since I had read the original by Herman Melville,  I really did not need to read what he had done. 

What it really was about was Ray's slightly embellished experiences of Ireland while he was writing the screenplay for the book. From the very first page I was enthralled with what he felt and saw and heard.  I liked how he wrote about the director John Huston, and I loved how in one chapter he described a stale wedding cake (the wedding had been post-phoned a week) to Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.  I loved it so much I laughed a great deal and quite hard, which is a switch from my usual experience with  a Bradbury collection.  Usually, when I read a story by Ray it is a very intense feeling, my heart swells, I am awestruck, reality shifts and I am taken to a surreal plain where only Ray can take me.  I'm not kidding... it's really like that!  That's why he's the king of the short story, why he will live forever, because I have yet to find anything by anyone that has ever transported me like this. 
 I think after my earlier response to The Dinosaur Tales, Green Shadows, White Whale  was like a balm for my grief, and I feel strengthened by it to carry on reading through the rest of his books next year.

Dinosaur Tales

I spent a couple of months after  Ray's death buying up whatever books I didn't own of his (it was a job I had often thought of doing but always put off because it would be such a huge undertaking!).  After he died it became urgent for me to get them all before they would disappear too.  Of course, I was never disillusioned into thinking he would live forever... I knew he was very old, and it was such a gift to me whenever I discovered a new collection of his stories in the library, but that doesn't make it easier when they do go.  This is a personal hurt for me, because through his books I felt that I knew him, and there was such a deep sense of loss when he died.  
I haven't, except for The Halloween Tree and The October Country,  read any of his work for quite some time, so this little book, with its illustrations and poetry was a new experience.   I learned something new about Ray which was that he was friends with Ray Harryhausen, and that he was a lover of dinosaurs (which, of course, makes perfect sense knowing what I do know about Ray).  So this collection was a nice way to begin a year long challenge of reading those books of his  that I bought this year.  At the end I have to say that it was tough.  Usually at the end of a story or a collection of his stories I have this feeling that I have been touched by greatness, I can't believe where he has taken me and every experience is different.  This time it was bittersweet for me.  While he has physically left us he will never really leave, because his stories will live forever.  I can keep him alive as long as I am living simply by just reading something of his.  He isn't really gone, he didn't disappear, he's still here with me, every time I open one of his books.