Ray Bradbury[]
I just read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (set at Cooger and Dark's circus) and found it underwhelming. I have never found Bradbury appealing, as his stories often prioritize moralizing and showing off his vocabulary over telling a good story. The story of SWTWC is passable, but I dislike the high-faluting purple prose, which has little in the way of great memorable lines, and instead comes across as Charles Dickens attempting to write Goosebumps. I then saw the 1983 film adaptation, where Jonathan Pryce is pretty good as the arch villain, Jason Robards does an adequate job as an unlikely hero, the child actors are not unbearable, and Pam Grier is great but is hardly in the movie at all. My main beef is the seeming overreliance on Goosebumps clichés, but this may be a Casablanca effect where the clichés come from this story.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 07:42, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- Goosebumps began in 1992 so you can't accuse Bradbury of ripping off Stine.
- That being said, I've never read this story. I have even less time for Bradbury than you do. I had to read Fahrenheit 451 for my high school summer reading, and never forgave him.
- I always resented the hell out of summer reading because I spent my boyhood summers mostly reading anyway, and the assignments just delayed my plunging into books of my own choosing. That same summer I also had to read And Then There Were None, which delayed by decades my ability to enjoy Agatha Christie. Last year I reread ATTWN and found it's quite a fun read in the absence of coercion, even with me somewhat surprisingly remembering it well enough that I knew from the beginning who the killer was. I have no intention of giving F451 another chance, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:41, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- My AP English teacher was smart. She required that we read three books over the summer, two of which could come from a lengthy list she provided, the third could come from our list, or could be our own choice, so long as it was of a similar "caliber" as the other books on the list. I picked Frankenstein and Brave New World, both of which I'd already read. TR (talk) 17:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- From ninth through eleventh grades we had to read four books each summer, of the school's choosing. It was the strangest mix of minor installments in the canon, such as F451, ATTWN, and Catcher in the Rye, and random YA novels, some of which were decently interesting and nearly all of which were breezy enough that I could pound them out in a few days. I'm not necessarily going to claim that the books I chose for myself were superior to these, but I really don't think my life would be any poorer if I hadn't read most of them.
- Heading into twelfth grade the English department decided to assign one meaty novel instead of four fluffy ones. That one was Snow in August by Pete Hamill, a lovely coming of age story set in postwar Brooklyn that touched on all sorts of interests I held at the time. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:42, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- I didn't mind Bradbury but I'm not thrilled by his work. I read SWTWC in high school along with Fahrenheit but neither have stuck in my memory.
- “I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. ... there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
- My instinct is very much to agree, though I do often surprise myself by being able to trot out on demand useless facts that should certainly have long since been overwritten. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:42, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- I recently learned that Elementary went seven seasons. I watched the first three and then lost track of it. By that point the run of the mill episodes had already lost their Holmesian luster and had started to feel like any other police procedural, Law & Order with a few superficial trappings. The season long arcs held my interest. I especially enjoyed the way they remixed elements from the source material, like making Moriarty and Irene Adler one and the same. I'm mildly curious to see what else they did along those lines.
- Speaking of Moriarty, my highest recommendation to Anthony Horowitz's novel by that name, to anyone who's interested. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:42, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
- Fahrenheit 451 made no sense to me. A modern state requires universal literacy (or nearly so) to survive, so the idea that the fascist state wants to erase all books, period, no exceptions, isn't remotely believable. Bradbury was attacking a straw man.
- People were literate in the book. I recall one scene where another fireman hands the main character a pamphlet falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin to provide historical context on their charter. The history is falsified but they don't know that, and more importantly, they're entirely capable of reading the pamphlet. There's also a place where we're told that comic books and erotica are still permitted. I suppose either of those could get their messages across with very little text, but it sure seemed to me at the time that these were classified as books and on the unbanned list even so.
- Ugh, I can't believe I'm defending this stupid book. Turtle Fan (talk) 07:17, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- Were there "haunted traveling carnival" stories before 1962? Haunts and carnivals are such a natural pairing that I would be surprised if Bradbury was the first.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 02:31, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- I have no idea. Turtle Fan (talk) 07:17, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- What was your main beef with F451? Just that it was required?Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 08:25, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- I really did resent required summer reading when I would have spent the summer reading if left to my own devices anyway, but I still sometimes found books I enjoyed that way even if I was reluctant to admit as much in public. But I just found F451 very unpleasant and uninteresting. Turtle Fan (talk) 14:55, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- I read it without being required. I simply wanted to see what the fuss was about. I find "unpleasant and uninteresting" to be a fairly accurate description of F451. The book's good parts felt like an uninspired ripoff of George Orwell's 1984, and the rest of the book was fairly dopey. I couldn't see any obvious reason why the fascist government would be so deadset against people reading Millay, Whitman, and Faulkner, mainly because those authors bore the crap out of me. Bradbury seemed to be attacking a straw man.
- Something Wicked This Way Comes is basically a Goosebumps story. Maybe RL Stine got the entire idea of Goosebumps from this novel, I don't know. It would have worked as a Goosebumps story, but the first half is full of purple prose which can cause the reader to lose interest before any action happens. I didn't hate it, but it wasn't great.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 22:26, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- I wouldn't be against having an atmospherically spooky carnival story in the holster and I see it's only six bucks in the Kindle store. I've added it to my private wish list for mildly interesting books that I may or may not get to some day. I see it's the middle book of something called the Greentown Trilogy, does it stand on its own? If not then I'm out. I'm not curious enough to commit to reading a prequel first. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
- According to Wikipedia, the first Greentown story Dandelion Wine (unread by me) and SWTWC are both set in the fictional Illinois town (analog of Waukegan, Bradbury's hometown), but do not have any of the same characters. The Wikipedia entry also confirms that RL Stine is a fan, which is not surprising.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 09:42, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
- I just read Dandelion Wine. The story is unrelated to SWTWC except for the name of the town, so it is not necessary to read DW, an uninteresting slog with no redeeming qualities. I like Damon Knight's take on it. "Childhood is Bradbury's one subject, but you will not find real childhood here, Bradbury's least of all. What he has had to say about it has always been expressed obliquely, in symbol and allusion, and always with the tension of the outsider—the ex-child, the lonely one. In giving up this tension, in diving with arms spread into the glutinous pool of sentimentality that has always been waiting for him, Bradbury has renounced the one thing that made him worth reading...The period is as vague as the place; Bradbury calls it 1928, but it has no feeling of genuine recollection; most of the time it is like second-hand 1910."Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 05:54, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
- Hmm, speaking of purple prose.
- I did buy SWTWC after the above discussion. Then I forgot about it, now I've been reminded. Maybe I'll save it for Halloween. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:11, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
- How did that go?Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 12:31, 15 February 2025 (UTC)
- Eh, it was all right. I did quite enjoy the atmosphere when it was shining through, but the purple prose was definitely laid on way too thick even for me, and that got in the way. And the mythos made no sense at all, nor did the characters' ability to unravel it and figure out how to defeat the already vaguely-defined danger. So maybe it is the template for Goosebumps after all.
- Just a few weeks after I finished it, The Simpsons did a Bradbury-themed episode. They used Cooger and Dark as the framing device, with the Illustrated Man sort of trapping Lisa into three events in his tattoos, each of which was a parody of a Bradbury story. The Fahrenheit 451 parody was actually the best of them, with their society forcing everyone to watch pretentious prestige TV shows and suppressing shlock. I'm mainly grateful that I got the book read just in time to appreciate the reference. Turtle Fan (talk) 17:17, 15 February 2025 (UTC)