Currently Reading #20 #2

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

Poor lonely little blog. Is anybody reading YOU?

Ploughing on with the Bradbury book but damn it's cold in this house. Not conducive to relaxing with a book. Not at all.

I keep sitting around looking pitiful and hoping the Powers That Be will realise you need to heat your house in December.

And adding layers. I'm even wearing socks.

One of these Bradbury stories, 'Perchance to Dream', gave me a bit of a surprise. Halfway through, I realised Bradbury had forgotten that the protagonist, Sale, was wearing a spacesuit. It's not the sort of mistake Bradbury usually makes. So I went back and checked to see if Sale had taken the suit off, or if he'd realised the atmosphere on the planetoid on which he'd crash-landed was safe, and so at least had taken his helmet off, but no.... If you fire a gun at your head while wearing a spacesuit and the round grazes your forehead, at some point it's passed through your suit, yes? And possibly let the oxygen out. Bradbury just seems to have plain forgot. And the editor didn't notice. And so it comes to me, so I can go, Eh?

In general, though, I'm enjoying the book. It's clear Bradbury was telling the truth when he said he didn't set out to write Science Fiction, he just wrote stories and other people decided they were that. Some of these stories, like 'The Little Mice', are not SF at all. They're just weird. In a good way. The stories are bite-sized but they don't feel incomplete. Sometimes I read a 3k story and think, where's the rest? Sometimes, I've literally turned the page to read the rest of the story and found it's not there. Some stories don't end; they merely stop. But Bradbury manages to write concise stories that satisfy. Quite a skill.