It is a late summer evening. I am 10 years old. I have just finished reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I can’t wait to go back to the library to find anything else he has written. I have fallen in love with The Martian Chronicles and with Ray Bradbury’s writing. I’d always liked books and reading, but The Martian Chronicles ensured I would be a lifelong addict, one of those people that has to have something to read if she’s stuck in a waiting room at a doctor’s office or the airport.
Through one wonderful book, I discovered the awesome power of language to transport a reader into an alternate realm, one woven of words, and of the feelings and images and thoughts they provoke. I discovered that the jumble of letters on a printed page can create realms that are alternately amusing or riveting, sometimes terrifying, at times achingly beautiful – always magical.
Bradbury wrote the stories I read that summer for the science fiction market, but he was no hack writer. He was a lyricist with the language. How lucky my 10-year-old self was to discover him that wonderful summer. The Martian Chronicles remains one of my favorite books, as does his Illustrated Man. I don’t think anything he wrote later quite matched those two volumes. But they didn’t have to.
The feeling Bradbury left with me that late summer evening sent me on a lifelong ongoing search for the wisdom, escape, and wonder lying in wait for me in every good book I will ever discover.
