Daily Loaf

Nervous about the waning light, I slid the silver key  into the lock and twisted it. I’d wanted to come here by myself first so I wouldn’t get all emotional in front of the real estate person, but maybe I’d made a mistake in venturing here alone.

About ten years ago, my father turned our rambling farmhouse into a restaurant. He made a go of it for a good long time until the economy turned bad and his health failed him.

Now I stood in the entranceway, staring at the hostess station with its oak counter that my father had made. The grains matched perfectly; dad would have had it no other way. The lemon scent of the wood polish he always used transported me right back in time. I felt the tears rush to my eyes. Now I was an orphan. No brothers and sisters, no spouse. Get a grip, Laura.

A sudden noise made me nearly turn around and run. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe I’m just a geezer who never got it with graphic novels.

I grew up on comic books and loved them, from the DC super heroes, to the uber-cool Marvel mutants, to the great works of literature presented by Classics Illustrated comics.

But I was  well removed from my comic- buying years when graphic novels began appearing. I figured they were just very good comics – well drawn, cooler angles, slick paper.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus changed my view of these books. That look at the Holocaust shocked a lot of people when it was published – you’re turning that atrocity into a comic book … featuring a mouse?  But Maus worked and earned respectability for the genre.

Now a great work of 20^th Century fiction has been re-imagined as a graphic novel.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Hill and Wang, hardcover, $30; paperback, $16.95) takes that classic about a book-burning culture maintained by thought police and presents it anew, with the sharp visual style of artist Tim Hamilton.

Of course, Bradbury would embrace this. This forward-thinking gent has even written a new introduction to the book. His classics – The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man and the essential Stories of Ray Bradbury – loom large in my life. I remember my older brother reading me Something Wicked This Way Comes from the top bunk, and I began a lifelong love for Bradbury’s work. I’ve particularly admired Fahrenheit 451, with its tortured protagonist Montag. He’s a fireman, but in the future, firemen start fires — to burn books and kill free speech. (The title notes the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns.)

Bradbury hasn’t gotten the respect he deserves as an American grand master. Unfortunately, noodle-headed mainstream critics long ago marginalized his work as science fiction when it’s actually great fiction that sometimes deals with science, technology and speculation. Read the rest of this entry »