I am declaring October to be Read A Book by Bradbury Month!

Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to read a book or story by Ray Bradbury and blog about it. If you don’t have a blog, send me an email and tell me what you think about the book, the man or his place in the world of words. I’ll publish it here if you’ll let me.

There has been no author who has influenced me more than Ray Bradbury. I have wanted to be writer since I read my first book, but Bradbury is THE writer. I spent several years trying to write like the master, and was only able to write a decent story after I gave up. I still have my Bradbury books that I started collecting in the mid 1960s.

I will read no other author this month. I have some collections of stories that I have not read, yet. I will reread Dandelion Wine for the first time in 30 years. I will try to remember what it was like to read The Gift, or A Medicine for Melancholy for the first time. Mr. Bradbury, here I go.

Each year in October I read Something Wicked This Way Comes. I have the preface memorized. Here are the first two paragraphs of the best book ever written:

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.
But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.