Ray Bradbury – Cindy Young-Turner

Alternative Booker Award

The lovely Melissa Robitille has tagged me with an Alternative Booker Award. The idea is to mention five of your favorite books and then tag five other bloggers to do the same. Five? How can I choose five favorites? Hmm. I’ll pick five, but of course there are many more favorites out there.

In no particular order…

1. Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

I can’t say for certain whether this will end up being an all-time favorite, since I just finished reading it last week. I enjoyed it enough to include it in the list, which says something. This one had been on my radar because I’d heard a lot of good things about it from lurking in the fantasy book groups on Goodreads. And recently three people who have reviewed my book said that Sydney reminded them of Vin from Mistborn. So clearly I had to read it! I’ll take being compared to this book as a high compliment. It was right up my alley, with thieves plotting to overthrow an evil empire and a street urchin with a mysterious past. I couldn’t put it down.

2. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

This was my first Neil Gaiman book. I loved the characters and the setting. “Mind the gap” took on a very different meaning when we were in London. I’ve read and enjoyed more of Gaiman’s work, but this one holds a special place in my heart.

3. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I cried at the end and several times during the book. Amazing, emotionally powerful. And as someone who can’t outline to save my life, I admire the incredibly intricate plot and wonder how in the world she kept it all straight. I have no desire to see the movie version. I don’t think it could do justice to the book.

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The book was terribly, terribly bleak and disturbing, but the prose was beautiful. The story haunted me for weeks after I finished it. I was a new parent at the time and the relationship between the father and son tore at my heart.

5. The October Country by Ray Bradbury

My first introduction to Bradbury, bought at a really neat used bookstore in Providence, RI. I loved his prose and the quirky, creepy stories.

So there you have it. I’m not sure what these books say about my psyche, if anything, other than I’m eclectic in my reading tastes. There are a lot more that I consider favorites. If you asked me a week or a month from now, I’d probably come up with a completely different list.

I’m tagging five bloggers to see what’s on their list of favorites:

Something spooky this way comes

I’m from Massachusetts and fall is by far my favorite time of year. There’s something about the beautiful red and yellow foliage and the changing of the light that turns everything gold. I love going apple picking and getting some many apples that you’re “forced” to make all kinds of apple treats–pies, bread, applesauce, baked apples, apple crisp, you get the idea. It’s the time of year to start hunkering down and getting ready for the long winter to come. There’s hot apple cider and pumpkins and hayrides and, of course, Halloween.

There’s a kind of magic in the air during fall, and particularly in October. You can almost feel like the walls between the worlds are growing thin and anything is possible. It’s a good time of year to get out the spooky stories. I recently read Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes as part of a group read on Goodreads. He’s a brilliant writer and he does creepy and psychological horror very well. I highly recommend it. Of course, almost as soon as I started the book our local carnival arrived. Yikes. I’m sure it was perfectly harmless, but I did not attend. Bradbuy’s October Country, the first book of his that I read, is a collection of deliciously eerie stories that are also perfect for this time of year.

I much prefer psychological horror to the gory kind. My imagination can scare me quite well. Authors like M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and Algernon Blackwood have written some terrifying short stories. And “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs made me want to turn on all the lights after reading it (although there was a brilliant spoof on The Simpsons that takes away from some of the original’s power when I picture Homer holding the monkey’s paw to make a wish).

What are some of your favorite fall activities? And what do you read when you’re looking for a good scare?

RIP Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
-Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

We lost a great writer yesterday with the death of Ray Bradbury. One of the panels I did at Balticon was Stories We Like to Hear Out Loud and I read Ray Bradbury’s “The Emissary,” a great little story about a boy and his dog. The boy is bedridden and depends on his dog to tell him about the world, but the dog also has a bad habit of bringing things home, things he shouldn’t. I love the opening paragraph:

“Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springsof hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberryvine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!”
-Ray Bradbury, “The Emissary,” from The October Country

Years ago a friend took me to a great used bookstore and introduced me to Ray Bradbury. My favorites are The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine. Bradbury was such an amazing writer and truly had a gift with language and storytelling. If only we could capture his talent like bottling summer in a bottle of dandelion wine. He will be missed, but he will live on in his stories. And who says genre fiction isn’t literature? Just read one of Bradbury’s stories to see how powerful science fiction and fantasy can be.