Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Reading let me control the pace; savor the beautiful prose; linger and reread particularly striking instances of imagery. And yet listening to it as a tale retold by a raconteur had its strong appeal also as it enhanced that sense of a man looking back on his childhood, so I'm not saying it's a worse experience; equally marvelous, just different.
|
I find it interesting that this summer is the third in a row that the book clubs have read Bradbury. The Lit Club read
Martian Chronicles in 2016, the MR Book Club read
Fahrenheit 451 in 2017, and now the NLBC has read
Dandelion Wine. I would have challenged myself to read
Fahrenheit 451 eventually because it is a classic. However I likely never would have read the other books without the clubs due to my perception of Bradbury as a science fiction writer, which is a genre I read infrequently. I have surprisingly enjoyed all of them and am glad to have discovered his writing!
Well said, issybird! My experience was similar. I'm glad that I read the book after I listened to it. I loved this book too.
Much of the novel content originally was published as short stories in various magazines. I liked the structure and how it was loosely woven together into episodes/moments like a scrapbook of summer. I also read my nomination,
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, which was about a little girl going through a similar childhood awakening and her interactions with her elderly grandmother. It was similarly organized into loose episodes like
Dandelion Wine. However emotionally it was more raw (and less nostalgic) to mirror the island living, natural habitat and weather. These were great novels to pair together!
