Ray Bradbury Dies

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” When all writing is 144 characters long, there won't be anymore books written in a generation or two - who would ever have the attention span left to read one? Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together. One of my all favorite authors passed away this week. He was Ray Bradbury, the author responsible for hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels, the least which is the classic Farenheit 451. That novel was one of the first pieces of 'adult speculative figure' I ever read and it set me on a path as a voracious reader and book collector because I hate, hate, hate, the fact that any government can just burn the books they don't like. I always worried that if I someday wrote a book it would be burned too and that infuriated me as a kid - even then I had a high opinion of my writing ability. If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. I mentioned before that since I was a kid and teacher, Bradbury was the gold standard when it come either learning or teaching about great story construction and writing. Bradbury had such a fabulous way of making you think and made important and relevant points about the human condition. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.