I've mentioned J.M. DeMatteis on this blog a handful of times before: from (re-)discovering his work in my post about Moonshadow, to him inspiring me to read Dostoyevsky, to meeting him in person last year in St. Louis (which basically made my year). Now I get to mention him again.
On Friday he wrote about how much he loves, and has been influenced by, the work of Ray Bradbury, and that Saturday would be Bradbury's birthday. At one point he said that Dandelion Wine is "one of the most glorious and magical books ever written." For some reason that struck a chord, and I decided to read the book now. As far as I remembered, Fahrenheit 451 was the only Bradbury book I'd ever read, and that was decades ago in school.
So I went to the library Saturday morning and checked out a copy. As I wandered around the aisles, I noticed a display on an endcap celebrating Bradbury's birthday:
I started reading it after I got home, and I finished it the next day. Wow, Bradbury has a way with words! And a way of finding the magic in everything. It was excellent. In a way, though, it wasn't quite what I expected based on the little I knew about it. I thought it was the carefree summer adventures of a 12-year-old boy. It is that, partly, but it's also a bittersweet slice of life of people in his small town. There were, to me, a surprising number of elderly characters, all reflecting on their lives.
Bradbury grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, which is not far from us. The book is semi-autobiographical. Although the town in the book is called "Green Town, Illinois," it's really based on Waukegan, and it was funny to see references to nearby towns that are real. I'm reminded of the time, years ago, when I saw the movie Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, in a theater. At one point her character says she's from Lake Zurich, Illinois, and everyone in the theater laughed because we were all sitting about 10 miles north of Lake Zurich!
So Dandelion Wine is great, and I'm happy I read it. After finishing it, I looked through librarything.com, which I use to keep track of the books we own, to see what Bradbury books we have on our shelves. I noticed we own The Martian Chronicles, another of Bradbury's books that DeMatteis recommended, and, to my great surprise, I discovered I've already read it! I had flagged it in LibraryThing as having been read in 2018. I must have really liked it, too, because I rated it 5 stars! I had completely forgotten this.
And, to make matters even worse, I dug a bit further and discovered I wrote a blog post about reading it! The post is called Mars, and in it, I wrote about learning that a Leonard Cohen song was actually based on a Lord Byron poem, which Bradbury quoted in The Martian Chronicles. Boy, the things you forget as the years go by!
The other Bradbury books we own, which I have NOT read are:
- I Sing the Body Electric! And Other Stories
-
Farewell Summer: A Novel (which is a sequel to Dandelion Wine)
- Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You
As you can see, I've got plenty more to read!