[astrangerhere]

I read Dandelion Wine one week after I read Virginia Woolf's The Years. And the more I read, the more I found the books similar. Woolf is known for her rambling, sometimes stream of consciousness style, and I feel like Bradbury was doing something similar. I realize that, as others have noted, that this was due to the stories being stitched together, but it was still striking in the reading.

I was struck by the overall sense of foreboding in all the stories. At any moment, any one of these pieces could have could have gone completely Hitchcock and it would not have felt out of place. I feel like that connected the stories more clearly and cleanly than anything else. Most of the foreboding seemed to be the inevitable end of summer (childhood?), or for the loss of things one can't hold on to (happiness, young love, youth).

I was grated by the happiness machine, like many of you, and I also note that I felt it was casually antisemitic in its choice of making the "grasping Jew" the object of the morality tale. I was also grated by the old woman grappling with the little girls. I found the little girls' meanness and cruelty offputting, especially as the boys had been shown with a reverential purity of spirit hithertofore.

I think the time machine pieces about the old soldier were the most compelling. The boys held him in awe, but his adult caretakers thought he was a doddering old fool. There was a distinct reverence for the elderly by the boys that I also appreciated.

All in all, I am pleased to have read this and found it a nice departure from other Bradbury I have read.

My favorite quotes from the book:

"No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now...Be what you are, bury what you are not..."

"Being cruel and thoughtless is much more entertaining when you are twenty."