A Pleasure to Burn
By Ray Bradbury
Summary: "A Pleasure to Burn" is the ideal companion to Bradbury's great novel "Fahrenheit 451." Edited by Bradbury authority Donn Albright, this generous volume gathers 16 vintage stories and novellas for a significant publishing event for scholars, aficionados, and casual readers.
Review:
This book was amazing. Like all the other Bradbury works I’ve read before, it is well written and creative. I have to gush about the beautiful cover. While similar to the cover of Fahrenheit 451, the different shades of blue and green and purple are gorgeous. I absolutely love this cover.
Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books, so when my husband came home with A Pleasure to Burn in hand for me, I was excited. This collection of short stories are part of the origin and evolution of Fahrenheit 451. I expected to see many parallels and I did. What I didn’t expect was to see parallels with some of his other works, such as the Martian Chronicles. This was surprising and delightful. The short stories are all equally interesting, creative, and well written.
My favorite thing about this book is the way it is laid out. It begins with a few short stories that I feel lead up to the meat of the book, the two novellas Long After Midnight and The Fireman. Then, it ends with two more short stories. It reminded me of a meal, starting with an appetizer, then the main course, and a wonderful dessert. It couldn’t have been organized better.
While I’m a fan of both Fahrenheit 451 and Ray Bradbury in general, I won’t pretend to know all there is to know about him and his works. I enjoy his writing. I don’t know what exactly prompted him to write Fahrenheit 451, but I enjoyed seeing ideas unfold in this collection. From civilizations that burn the dead to trash collectors changing from their regular jobs to clean up corpses, from worlds in which it is strange to walk the streets to bugs inside the houses of regular people, so many of the prominent ideas in Fahrenheit 451 are seen in many of these short stories.
Any fan of Fahrenheit 451 or Ray Bradbury’s short stories will enjoy this collection.
Labels: Review