Candle #2

Really plugging away at that Birth Year Reading Challenge List. Have now read Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric. Once upon a time I seemed to be involved in a regular Golden Age science fiction orgy. Bradbury, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg....the lot. That took me from pre-teens all the way through college. I still read SF, but not in the quantities that I did. It's a shame, really, I had forgotten how much I really loved Ray Bradbury. Digging into this short story collection for my Birth Year Challenge was absolutely delightful. I got to enjoy the title story all over again (I'd read it many moons ago). I love Bradbury's use of language and his way of using SF situations to describe the emotions of now. Whether that "now" be when the stories were actually written or the now of 2010. He absolutely captures the human condition whether he's showing the future humans on Earth or humans on Mars or humans in space. Four and 1/2 stars out Five.

How could I not love the writing of a man who gives us this?

"What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we dared to hope or dream..." (from the title story)

Or, less philosophical, but entirely delightful:

"Out of the ditch, we unloaded ourselves into a great Buck-a-Night Bungalow Court in a murderers' ambush behind a wood and on the rim of a deep rock-quarry where our bodies might be found years later at the bottom of a lost and sourceless lake, and spent the night counting the rain that leaked through the shingle-sieve roof and fighting over who had the most covers on the wrong side of the bed. (from "The Inspired Chicken Motel")

I'm glad the Challenge gave me the chance to read Bradbury again. I won't wait so long to do it again.