Well, that’s a good reason for an ebook! ;)
But yeah, it was a huge doorstop of a book back in the day!
Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is $1.99 on Amazon right now.
Haven’t read it since middle school, so picked it up. Never was disappointed by anything he wrote.
Thanks! Grabbed. Also haven’t read it in decades. I recently re-read the Martian Chronicles for the first time in years and it was great to revisit.
Awesome, one of my favorites (my mother got me hooked on anything Ray Bradbury, thanks Mom!) from way back when.
What kind of book is it? Not sci-fi, maybe something more like Something Wicked This Way Comes? Because I loved that one when I read it in high school (it evoked strong memories of the school year–6th grade–I lived on a dead-end street in Terre Haute, Indiana, with a big field off the end of said street and a wooded area on the other side, riding bikes all over the place with the neighbor kid around my age, doing things that were probably not the safest, like going into an abandoned house at one point).
It’s been decades but, yeah, you’ve got the right idea. It’s in the same vein as Something Wicked This Way Comes. Poetic coming of age laced with wonder, melancholy, and a hint of horror and the unknown.
It would be interesting to revisit those books now as a middle-aged grownup. I read them as a young teen and would certainly get even more out of them now.
This is also how I’d describe the Martian Chronicles. It’s SF is only in the superficial sense – rockets sent to Mars. At it’s core, if is filled with the very things you described.
Bradbury is, in a way, his own genre.
This thread is stirring up some major nostalgia. I wish I still had my mother’s Bradbury paperbacks. (Actually, maybe I do? I have some book boxes that haven’t been opened since my last move…)
Bradbury also got me into short stories, the perfect genre for someone like me who loved to read but was a slow reader with often poor retention. I struggled to finish anything but the shortest novels for high school English class.
The Twilight Zone is a lot like the Martian Chronicles in that way.
I reread this last year, after having last read it 25 years ago. What a fantastic collection of short stories. Particularly, The Earth Men and Usher II.
It was genius to publish it as one novel (though I think Bradbury added a few “interludes” and perhaps a new story or two to better connect them all), as it works as a whole.