My Bradbury Collection

These are three of my oldest books. My mom originally bought me I Sing the Body Electric when I was a kid and getting into reading, but getting too old for the kids stuff I'd been working on. Ray Bradbury was one of the world's best sci-fi guys--this is what I was told, and it's true. I knew that he had written the Martian Chronicles, and seeing at the time that I planned on being the first man on Mars, I figured that that would be my first Bradbury book.

I remember thinking that "I Sing the Body Electric" was a very cool phrase; it sparked all sorts of imaginative things in me, but I don't remember ever reading everything in this copy. Perhaps I did, but that would have been during a summer spent in Sacramento and up at our family Cabin near a volcano where there was no television.

Very soon after being seen staring at the pages of this copy, I was given two more copies of Bradbury work: The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

They were of the same edition, like you can see here with the Chronicles, but somewhere I lost my copy of Something Wicked...

As time went on and as I grew older and more sophisticated, in high school we were to read Fahrenheit 451, and instead of using the school issued copy, my mom got me this copy. "It's more important than that other stuff," she told me, and here she was right.

Fast forward another five or six years and I learn what my dad had been trying to tell me: "I Sing the Body Electric", from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, from which the Bradbury borrowed, is one of the most beautiful and important things ever written by an American. Ray Bradbury, like so many others, was influenced by a master, and I gained a new perspective.