Dandelion Wine

If you appreciate poetry. If you were ever a 10-year-old boy in the midwest. This is the best book ever written in the English language.[return][return][return]As long ago as I can remember having a favorite book, it's been Dandelion Wine. Martian Chronicles was good sci-fi and Farenheit 451 was a very important book in my life. But Dandelion Wine walks many paths. It's first appeal to me was through the youth of it's hero - the Dennis-the-Menace-like Douglas Spaulding and his well-described childhood frights of abandoned ravines and people hiding in closets. As I grew up and began to admire styles - Ray Bradbury's was the best. No one has ever walked the fine line between poetry and prose any better. His sentences are delicious. For the sheer pleasure of reading something that's been well written, no one else is as satisfying. Now, I'm old and nostalgic. I love the torture and sense of regret in works like Winesburg, Ohio and Spoon River Anthology. My favorite book? Still Dandelion Wine. But now I read it as a chronicle of a long spent childhood. The similarities I have with the hero are now painful reminders that fictional characters don't have to age but I do and I have. But there is still a hope suggested by Bradbury that the memories of my own life can be pressed and bottled, to be enjoyed again when they've been forgotten as my own Dandelion Wine.