HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Dandelion Wine (Grand Master Editions) by…
Loading...

Dandelion Wine (Grand Master Editions) (edition 1985)

by Ray Bradbury

Series: Green Town (1)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
7,5011891,201 (4.04)1 / 541
Fantasy. Fiction. Short Stories. Historical Fiction. HTML:

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semiautobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine that can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

.
… (more)
Member:earlgreyrooibos
Title:Dandelion Wine (Grand Master Editions)
Authors:Ray Bradbury
Info:Spectra (1985), Edition: Reissue, Mass Market Paperback
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:Ray Bradbury

Work Information

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

  1. 91
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (infiniteletters)
  2. 40
    Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury (section241)
  3. 30
    The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (Jannes)
    Jannes: Interconnected stories abour childhood and endless summers. Bradbury is more fantastical, while Jansson leans more to the realistic and understated, but both books runs over with wonderful and lyrical prose, and both captures a sense of childhood and summer in a way that is very rare.… (more)
  4. 30
    My Ántonia by Willa Cather (allenmichie)
  5. 10
    Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor (allenmichie)
  6. 10
    Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (Michael.Rimmer)
  7. 21
    The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (souloftherose)
  8. 05
    Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences by Barbara Holland (bertilak)
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

» See also 541 mentions

English (180)  Spanish (4)  Danish (1)  Bulgarian (1)  German (1)  Italian (1)  Swedish (1)  All languages (189)
Showing 1-5 of 180 (next | show all)
There’s no question in my mind that Bradbury was one of the world’s greatest short story writers. Apart from perhaps his novel Farenheit 451, most of his books are either explicitly collections of short stories, or a string of short stories bound together by some overriding theme or linking narrative. The Martian Chronicles, The

Illustrated Man – collections of wonderful short stories joined together into longer narratives.

Dandelion Wine is just like that: a set of stories set in Greentown, Illinois, in the year 1928 (just one year after the annus mirabilis explored by Bill Bryson in his book One Summer). They are linked by the characters of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his younger brother Tom. It’s a book about growing up, full of both sweet nostalgia and childhood fears, clearly at least semi-autobiographical. There’s both humour and terror, and a way of life now long past when children could explore the world unencumbered by regulations or too much parental concern.

And the writing is gorgeous, beautifully crafted, again a delight to read aloud. Just listen to Colonel Freeleigh, an old man who the boys call ‘The Time Machine’ for his marvellous ability to take them into the past as he reminisces about his life:

‘Eighteen seventy-five … yes, me and Pawnee Bill on a little rise in the middle of the prairie, waiting. “Shh!” says Pawnee Bill. “Listen.” The prairie like a big stage all set for the storm to come. Thunder. Soft. Thunder again. Not so soft. And across that prairie as far as the eye could see this big ominous yellow-dark cloud full of black lightning, somehow sunk to earth, fifty miles wide, fifty miles long, a mile high, and no more than an inch off the ground. “Lord!” I cried, “Lord!” – from up on my hill “Lord!” the earth pounded like a mad heart, boys, a heart gone to panic. My bones shook fit to break. The earth shook: rat-a-tat rat-a-tat, boom! Rumble. That’s a rare word: rumble. Oh, how that mighty storm rumbled along down, up, and over the rises, and all you could see was the cloud and nothing inside. “That’s them!” cried Pawnee Bill. And the cloud was dust! Not vapors or rain, no, but prairie dust flung up from the tinder-dry grass like fine corn meal, like pollen all blazed with sunlight now, for the sun had come out. I shouted again! Why? Because in all that hell-fire filtering dust now a veil moved aside and I saw them, I swear it! The grand army of the ancient prairie: the bison, the buffalo!’

Isn’t that glorious? I could quote pages like that. What a writer! ( )
  davidrgrigg | Mar 23, 2024 |
All of Bradbury's writing transports me to another place. ( )
  sfj2 | Mar 17, 2024 |
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, made a deep and lasting impression on me. It is already, after one reading, on my ever-mutating list of favourite books. It was powerful. I smiled cheerily at most of it, cried twice, and laughed out loud once. That's a lot of feeling from a woman with a locked-up heart, and a mind closed to love forever. I think this book may have changed the way I plan to live the rest of my days. At the very least, it has given me the impetus to think about leaving this sofa where I've weathered heartbreak and hid from a global pandemic, and mourned the death of both of my parents, and suffered more heartbreak and unemployment. It's become a hermit's cave, this old brown sofa. I'm so glad I encountered this book.

Dandelion Wine takes place in the summer of 1928, in Greentown, Illinois, and focuses on the lives of two brothers, Doug and Tom. These boys really know how to spend every moment of summer, and in the years before helicopter parenting, they had a summer like I used to have, outdoorsy, unsupervised, and mainly happy. The tales of new sneakers and matinees provide a lovely backdrop to the real power of this story, which points out that you can't get time back. In between cavorting and planning, the town where Doug and Tom live undergoes deaths, old romances, a serial killer (that was a surprise!), secrets, fears, and the bottling of dandelion wine, which is the very essence of childhood summers.

I could smell grass and Coppertone sun lotion and heat while I read. I could hear cicadas droning, noisy children, and crickets, to whose music I fell asleep almost every night of my childhood summers. I don't know when I've read a book so evocative of my youth.

I expected science fiction. It is what Bradbury's known for. It wasn't. It veered briefly into horror when a serial killer comes to town, an event so tautly writtien that at one point I screamed out loud, but it is not science fiction in any discernable way. I find myself comparing it, even while reading it, to my beloved A Death in the Family by James Agee, a masterpiece of American fiction, perhaps the finest of the twentieth century. Dandelion Wine stands next to it, proudly.

The narrator was excellent. He had a fine voice and dramatized with excellence. His name is David Aaron Baker.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. ( )
1 vote ahef1963 | Feb 20, 2024 |
I have never tasted dandelion wine, but I feel like I can conjure it to my lips. The aroma from the old, cloudy bottle is redolent of nostalgia; a cloying scent of freshly cut grass and your nan's culinary magic undercut by a sweaty, fetid, almost smegmacious, stench that coats the sinuses. The first sip effervescing on the tongue; an explosion of ecstacy, as if standing in Wonka's factory as the bombs fall. Every sweet and sour taste is there, so perfectly overwhelming in their apotheosis. Now the nose is running, mouth watering, tastebuds fizzing. The palette, now roused by this wondrous sensation, yawns and stretches, before rolling over and awaiting the flavours to bathe it. Boiling treacle reaches out with tentacles of nostalgia, strangling the palette, coating it in choking oil, even as the bittersweet bit in its mouth keeps it distracted. Your mouth is held open, a foie gras funnel forced down your gullet as the sickly, gritty substance is pushed inside. You choke and splutter, while faceless family members and your imaginary friends comfort you, whispering the exact exquisite words you always needed to hear to be complete. You feel calm for a moment, enjoying the embrace and savouring the sugary alcoholic bite, and what it's doing to you. The spigot is turns all the way, filling you with gloop, until you explode and lay among the tatters of everything else that wasn't in the recipe. ( )
  RatGrrrl | Dec 20, 2023 |
Sometimes when you re-read something after a gap of many years, especially something read when you were a teen, you are disappointed so I was braced for that, but need not have worried. This is an extended prose poem, evoking emotion, atmosphere, the experiences of a young boy growing up, and the setting of a small American town off the beaten track in the state of Illinois, pre WWII - eventually we find out it is 1928. The timespan is just the three months from June to end August, basically the children's summer holiday from school, and the main characters are Douglas Spaulding and his 10-year-old brother Tom. The book is nostalgic - for the author's own childhood I imagine - and some of it does not quite come off - the Happiness Machine section I found a bit silly - but it is a set of vignettes and short stories exploring various aspects of summer and the small town characters.

During these short three months, Douglas' life changes irrecovably as he first really feels alive and then suffers a series of losses - his best friend leaves town due to the father's job change and various older characters pass on, though not without affecting their friends and families and leaving traces of themselves behind. Douglas records his experiences in a notebook and discusses them with his younger brother though he finds it impossible to convey the sense of his own mortality and the depression that descends on him, which at one point nearly becomes his undoing.

There are a few sections from other character's POVs and among these, the section about the women who attend an evening film performance and the one who comes home alone - bearing in mind there is a serial killer who comes into town occasionally and targets women - is one of the most effective. I think though, that the sections concerning the coming to terms by older people with their own looming end are much more poignant on this re-read, given the passage of time. Anyway, in view of the slight niggle mentioned above, 4.5 stars which translates into 5 on Goodreads. ( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 180 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review

» Add other authors (22 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Ray Bradburyprimary authorall editionscalculated
克彦, 北山Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Canty, ThomasCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
甲賀, 平野Cover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Goodfellow;, PeterIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
O'Brien, TimCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pennington, BruceCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Sewell, AmosCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Божилова, ЖениTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
For
Walter I. Bradbury
neither uncle nor cousin but most decidedly editor and friend.
First words
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.
Quotations
"Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies....Dig in the earth, delve in the soul. Spring those mower blades and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth."
"Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for element. Air ran like hot spring water howhere, with no sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene vaports. Tar was poured licorise in the streets...."
Douglas's mouth was slightly open and from his lips and from the thin vents of his nostrils, gently there rose a scent of cool night and cool water and cool white snow and cool green moss, and cool moonlight on silver pebbles lying at the bottom of a quiet river and cool clear water at the bottom of a small white stone well.
.It was like holding their heads down for a brief moment to the purse of an apple-scented fountain flowing cool up into the air and washing their faces....They could not move for a long time."
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

Fantasy. Fiction. Short Stories. Historical Fiction. HTML:

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semiautobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine that can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Some favorite passages:  Moved to quotes
    -------------------------------------

The summer of '28 was a vintage season for growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakes.
Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner.

It was a summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding - remembered forever by the incomprabel
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (4.04)
0.5 1
1 17
1.5 6
2 75
2.5 16
3 252
3.5 59
4 475
4.5 83
5 551

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

Tantor Media

An edition of this book was published by Tantor Media.

» Publisher information page

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,239,682 books! | Top bar: Always visible