Reviews

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

corn_001's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

ndryngi_'s review against another edition

adventurous funny relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes

3.25

redheadreader73's review against another edition

3.0

I really enjoyed many of the stories but they become all too similar after a while. Fabulous idea for a book of short stories though. I loved Fahrenheit 451 as a teenager and read it again and felt it had stood the tests of time well whereas many of these stories just felt a bit dated, a 1950s view of the future.

kentons's review against another edition

adventurous dark funny mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

acrowder's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional informative mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

nabend23's review against another edition

adventurous dark funny mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.25

graciegrace1178's review against another edition

4.0

The Illustrated Man (2016 Motion Picture)

source: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/8f/ee/038feea351b0914b2900a34a00965312.gif


PT: Bradbury month (late Feb to March 2022), clever arrangements, books that make me re-evaluate writing as a craft, short story collections

Once again, Bradbury has blown me away with his unique ability to synthesize seemingly disparate ideas. Bradbury!!! This whole thing was so clever!!! I feel like Ray maybe had a whole bunch of short stories all of the same general tone, and he sat at his desk for a good long while thinking "how can I possibly unify all of these??" And thus The Illustrated Man was born. I had to pause the audiobook for a while and try to consider Bradbury's thought process there, and I had SO much fun bouncing around in that thought experiment.

ftrebelo's review against another edition

3.0

Any collection of short stories has highs and lows, and this collection is no exception. I really liked the framing idea: following the tattooed illustrations on the Illustrated Man and all starting with the (implicit) question "what if". (I even would have liked the Illustrated Man's story to be a bit more developed). A lot of the stories took place on Mars, a few were a bit macabre for my taste, while others were achingly beautiful.

Some of my favorites included The Other Food (what if there was a colony on African Americans who escaped Jim Crow and then a rocket with white men landed?), The Man (what if you landed on a planet just after Jesus Christ had left?), and The Day Before the World Ends (what if the world was going to end tomorrow and everyone knew it?). But in my opinion, the two best were both about the relationship between fathers and their children: The Rocket Man (what if your father was addicted to space travel, and would go off into space three months at a time? how would you and your mother deal with that?) and The Rocket (what if you could only afford one ticket to go to space - who in your family would get to go?).

brandoshizzle's review against another edition

adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

sas02948's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

4.0