RIP Ray Bradbury. You were The Shit.

Song for this post: "Something Wicked This Way Comes" ~ Light for Fire

I have a personal goal to own 10,000 hardback books by the time I die. I've had that goal for a while. I know. Everyone should feel bad for my future husband and hope to God we don't move often. I love books. I love stories. I prefer a good book to my Kindle. Someday, when I publish, I want to have a special edition of my books printed on cut pages.

I've always loved to read. Very little television was played in my father's house when we were little. He said often that, if there was one thing he wanted for his girls it was that they all KNOW how to THINK. That's a powerful statement. So we read a lot. He reads a lot. If the television was on in that house when we were little, it was usually Star Trek. This created a life long love of two things for all of his daughters: Science Fiction...and Jean Luc Picard.

One of the first "real" books I remember reading as a child is Something Wicked This Way Comes.  It continues to be one of my very favorite books and one I pick back up on occasion and read again and again. Ray Bradbury was a genius.

So today is a sad day. A great literary mind has passed.  Ray Bradbury didn't just tell amazing stories, like so my other favorite writers, he told us about life, politics, love, and human compassion through his stories in a way that ingrained those ideals in your heart forever. He made you think about the world around you, really think and form your own conclusions instead of just lazily believing what you're told.

Thank you, Ray Bradbury. For helping my dad get what he wanted.

"I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them."

...Ray Bradbury ~ Something Wicked This Way Comes