Quick Book Reviews Blog

Ray Bradbury has captured the spirit of youthful summers like few others ever could in his Greentown Series, brought to an end with the third book, Farewell Summer .  In it, we continue to follow the story of thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his younger brother Tom, as they try their best to resist the inevitable tides of change, going as far as declaring war on old age itself.

Ray Bradbury has forever cemented his legacy as one of the titans of literature, with many of his works considered essential classics today. As is the case with most authors of this calibre, some of his stories went more under the radar than other ones despite being no worse, and it feels to me Dandelion Wine is one of them, following the story of the twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his one magical summer of 1928.

The Power of Melancholy Nostalgia is a feeling that comes us over every single one of us at some point or another, whether we're simply lost in the carefree days of our childhood or just daydreaming of a time when things were better. For the most part, we can only experience that feeling in relation to our own past; after all, how can one feel nostalgic for something they never had? Nevertheless, that's exactly what Ray Bradbury does to us in his classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes : he makes us yearn for a time and a life we've never lived.

Man has long dreamed to explore the deepest reaches of space, but before we can even think of going that far we should at least explore our own galaxy, and we are actually preparing a one-way mission to Mars that will send off some fortunate volunteers to build and live in a colony. The so-called Red Planet has fascinated us for a very long amount of time, an interest fueled by incredibly interesting discoveries, which includes a set of pyramids which, geographically-speaking, are the perfect mirror image of the ones in Giza .

The concept of the dystopian future was once extremely popular amongst science-fiction writers, and very few have capitalized on it as well as Ray Bradbury in his novel Fahrenheit 451 ¸at least in my opinion. Before getting into what I think about it though, I just want to give a quick recap of what it’s about for those unfamiliar with or have forgotten it. In Fahrenheit 451 , we follow the life of Guy Montag, a fireman… in the sense that he burns illegal possessions in the name of the government, such as books, and the houses they are stored in. Being oblivious to what he is doing (destroying culture), Guy returns to his wife every night to live out his bleak and bland life.