Something Wicked This Way Comes

Rating: 8.9/10

Reading this book felt like being in a bad dream. Ray Bradbury has an almost ethereal writing style, unlike anyone else I've read, that creates a mystical little town which is suddenly overtaken by Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Circus. Bradbury really lets your imagination do the heavy lifting but at the same time, makes the story flow effortlessly towards its discomforting conclusion.

It was hard to get into this initially due to the almost abstract way Bradbury likes to write, but once I let myself get engrossed in the world, I couldn't stop reading. I really liked it and will definitely make an effort to read more of Bradbury's work.

I didn't see the movie version of this until I was an adult, and I really disliked it. After reading the book, I have more sympathy for the filmmakers, since it sure SEEMS like there's enough imagery in it to make for a great movie. But in reality, everything that makes the book great is unfilmable — it's all the passages where Bradbury rhapsodizes about youth in small town America; or explains the sense of indescribable loss that comes from being reminded of your age; or sets the stakes for a tense scene not just as the fate of a young boy or his middle-aged father, but a battle between good and evil that goes back for millennia.

I was surprised to see in Bradbury's afterword that the story spent so much of its life in the form of various screenplays, since most of its essence seems to be in Bradbury's flowery descriptions (which were at some times overwrought, which along with some period-appropriate but still unfortunate sexist mentality, are my only complaints about the book).

And another book about nothing. The book tells the story of two boys, Jim and Will who are friends, and Will's father, who likes to drink and regrets not being young anymore. There is a storm coming, and the boys are gifted an metal rod device that can prevent lightning from burning their house.

Books like Asimov's and Dune grasped me in the very first sentence. This, and the latest ones I've been reading, does not.

Read: 10%, 54:00/9:17 hours