#author: ray bradbury

[havewereadthis]

"Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known."

[misireads]

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

[physical book, read in english]

an anthology of short related stories about the human colonisation of mars around the year 2000. starts from a couple of first expeditions that failed, then (briefly) moves on to successful colonial life in space.

➕ the most beautifully written book i've read in a long while, very nice poetic prose

➕ people in this book behave exactly how white people would if they were suddenly let on a new planet, namely absolutely infuriatingly. it was a frustrating read but a great one because yeah, that's what white people would do. expect to be celebrated as heroes when they arrive, then proceed to wipe the ingenious folks' towns and expect them to be christians.

➕ since the chapters were short stories, this was a very fast read.

➕ this is apparently a fix-up novel, meaning the stories were originally separate and were later brought together to create a more or less coherent novel. there's still a few weird aspects that don't quite work if you don't realise it's a fix-up, but overall it's fascinating.

➕ i'm not really much of a sci-fi person and especially not fond of stuff situated in space, but i didn't find this one off-putting for the theme.

➖ so… this is an old book, originally from 1950s. i'm not sure if i just missed some cue or if that's part of the social criticism, but… why are all the people in mars americans ??? i feel like there was some implication in the early chapters that "because of course americans would be the first to do something like travel to mars, therefore they came from america" but, for the rest of the book we only see american characters throughout. not a single person from some other country came in? really? as a european reading this it really kind of broke the immersion for me throughout, but if that's the entire point, that americans are just so full of themselves that they hoarded space travel and colonialism and made the new planet just another america with cities named new new york and whatever, then i accept it. plus basically all the characters are either weird, crazy, or unlikable in some other way so i'm fine with them all being american, actually. but from the point of view of how space colonialism like this would "realistically" work, i just don't think it would be average american-only families moving there to make their white picket fences in mars, i think it would be the super rich from all around the world. ah well i guess this wasn't the agenda of these novels (which, again, were originally separate). it's still a minus from me tho because i dislike america-centrism and it felt lazy and like no thought was put into what world would actually be like in 2000. the use of n word as if the society would be the exact same in this year felt like no thought was put into whether things would actually change in this time, yeeaah. i feel like, don't set a story in 2000 if you're going to write it like it's the 50s still. some things just don't sit right with me

➖ i also haven't read much sci-fi and especially not older sci-fi for the aforementioned reason… but the martians in this book were way too human-like and. like. they had human genders, heteronormative lifestyles (and were very american to begin with.. the not-human shaped aliens talked about sins to the priest with the implication 'oh we're way ahead of you and have been good christians before you were even born' ???? ok. i'm not sure if i just misunderstood that?????) even if a book is from the 50s, i feel like authors surely had enough imagination to come up with something other than this? or maybe this was part of the colonial aspect and maybe the martians were very human-like because they're like native americans who get wiped out from their own planet when white americans come and take their lands, i don't know. i guess, as someone who doesn't usually read sci-fi, i was confused by whether this is more of a satire about how much white americans suck, or a story about outer space and what martians and their world and way of life in mars could be like. it was my over-arching problem with this book and persisted to the very end where [spoiler] apparently it's again just some average middle class american family that's the only, literally ONLY people who move to mars to escape nuclear war? really??? it's just not feasible. it was kind of really fucking stupid, to be frank.

➖ the story about the guy who lives in the mountains and one week finds everyone's gone down in the city and answers a phone to find a woman calling it, and he goes all horny for her voice and decides to find her and has all these fantasies, and when they finally meet she's described as having a fat face and she's eating chocolate and spends all her time in beauty salons and he's immediately disgusted by her and proceeds to run away so he doesn't need to associate with her despite them being the only two humans left in mars. this was the most blatantly misogynistic garbage i've read in ages? why is it in the book, why does it even exist??? what's the point

⭐ score: 3 -- the writing itself would have been a 5 buuuuuut i had way too many problems with the book as a whole to score it any higher than this.

[veronicaleighauthor]

[litandlifequotes]

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

― Ray Bradbury

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Christmas Haul, 2023 Edition!

I am forever and always asking for books for Christmas, and this is what I was gifted this year! (If you think you see me stacking my TBR based on my own writing projects.....yeah okay you do lmao.)

[xenokhi]

Been in a mood with my writing so I decide to read some books about/by great authors. It has been a good pick me up right from the beginning. From Zen in the Art of Writing By Ray Bradbury You can borrow it for free from the Internet Archives https://archive.org/details/zeninartofwritin0000brad/page/6/mode/2up

[bradburyworks]

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury!

August 22, 1920

“I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns.”

The Fog Horn, Ray Bradbury

[mhb-oficial]

🇺🇸 Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

- Ray Bradbury

[bonerdonorxxx44]

Happy Birthday Sir Bradbury!

Ray Douglas Bradbury

Born: August 22, 1920 - Died: June 5, 2012

[markredfield]

[veronicaleighauthor]

[dark-ethereal-visions]

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called.

- Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

It’s what we Scots call an ‘aye Phone’.

Photo: A remote telephone box in the Scottish Highlands, near Kintar.

[metropolitianmania]

whenever someone tells me that my favorite author is problematic i ask them whose theirs is in return. if it’s anyone before 2000 i will call them a hypocrite. if it’s literally anyone on booktok i dismember them and burn their remains after feeding their fingers to my kittens. if they list a tumblr favorite I spontaneously combust. there is no winning in literature.

[theuniversalscat]

"Oh, God Almighty! I just want to go on being me! I'm on very good terms with myself. I've had a wonderful life, a terrific life. I've done all the things that I've wanted to do. When I was just out of high school I couldn't do anything. I couldn't write a decent poem, I couldn't write a short story, I couldn't write a play, I couldn't write an essay, I couldn't write a screenplay. So one by one, over the years, by staying in love, I became a poet, I became a short story writer, I became a novelist, I became a screenwriter--but it was all love, you see?"

-- Ray Bradbury

I love Ray a lot. Not necessarily for the stories he wrote as much as how he wrote; with pure joy, and love. I just have one question… how could he find his desk? 🙈🤷‍♀️🤣💓💓💓💓

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.