It's been a long time since I read Bradbury, but I never really read his stuff in any kind of sequence. Probably because I started reading him with a SFBC compendium of his short stories, then went around filling in by getting collections, etc. His novels are so much like collections of short stories anyway....

There are times when his tendency to recycle bothers me, but as, I think it was Hemingway, said, truly great authors write the same book over and over. If I spent more time thinking about it, I'd pay more attention to how the material changes subtly with context. But I'm usually having way too much fun with the elegance of the language and the amazing imagery to think that structurally.

Theme? Feh.

Blogging is.

Jonathan - It's precisely the elegance of Bradbury's writing that captivates me. It's the poetry of his descriptions, the precision of his language, that I fall in love with over and over again.

I notice the recycling. This is something that, in many other authors, annoys me extremely. For some reason, it never annoys me with Bradbury. He makes it fresh enough each time to get away with it. :) (Although I can't vouch for the impact of sitting down and reading 20 of his books one after the other--the recycling could be irritating that way.)

Ahistoricality - In fact, I'm always threatening to get a theme. :) And never quite getting around to finding one. I like having a place where I can talk about anything.

Like, if I had time today, I'd be complaining about Bush opening 15 million acres or whatever it was in Alaska, for oil drilling, and speculating on the weirdness of both New York and Austin having "smells" on the same day (Big Brother is gassing you!) and chatting about really long book series and wondering how authors manage to keep the excitement and enthusiasm and continuity going for decades.

Sadly, work calls.

I hadn't heard about Austin: that is odd. We were talking at the breakfast table about the NY smell, and the Little Anachronism is now firmly convinced that there's a feral army of huge skunks -- 1009 of them, our current favorite number -- prepared to assault major cities.... which would make a fantastic horror spoof, if you ask me.

Well, it would have to be better than that ridiculous one where people were being menaced by frogs, right? (I mean--not even giant frogs. Just--frogs. And all they did was sit there and ribbit at people. Whattheheck?)

Austin was about dead birds. I was remembering coal miners taking canaries down in the shafts where them when I read that there was a huge, inexplicable bird die-off that morning in Austin and that they didn't know why downtown was littered with carcasses.