I just really enjoy Bradbury and his talent for writing short stories. While this collection isn’t my favorite of his, there are some gems in these pages.

Impecable

I've enjoyed a number of Bradbury's stories and novels in the past. Fahrenheit 451, the Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes are wonderful. But this collection just didn't do anything for me. I'm sure it's me...

This was an overall decent collection, but not Bradbury's best. There are some good stories, but as far as Bradbury collections go, this seemed a little weak compared to "The Illustrated Man", "The Martian Chronicles", or "The October Country". The stories in "Long After Midnight" are more down to Earth, with less sci-fi and weird fiction than his other collections that I have read. There's more of a human element here, but less imagination and excitement.

I was somewhat disappointed as it wasn't what I was expecting based on the other Bradbury collections I have read. However, even though a lot the stories were a little bland compared to his other work, his descriptive writing is still top tier. Even if a given story in this collection doesn't stand out, every story has at least one or two passages worth highlighting. If it weren't for this, I would have given this book only three stars, but Bradbury's writing style gives this collection a huge boost.

A prime example is in the story "GBS Mark V":
" This was the place of stars. Which is to say the one place in all the ship, where if one wished, one could come and truly look at the Universe and the billion billion stars which poured across it and never stopped pouring, cream from the mad dairies of the gods".

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this to someone new to Bradbury, but it's worth checking out for readers who have enjoyed his more famous work and want check out some of his lesser known writing.

Overall a good collection of stories, not all of them are SiFi but that's fine

The Blue Bottle (1950)- very good story about what's the journey & what's the end of the journey
One Timeless Spring (1946)- non SiFi, a pretty good representation of the fantasies that we 'build' for ourselves when we are young & what it takes to destroy them
The Parrot Who Met Papa(1972)-didn't like this one too much.
The Burning Man(1975)- very nice short horror story
A Piece of Wood (1952)-what does it really means when people say "we would all be happy if all weapons would disappear", especially by military people- very good
The Messiah (1973)- A SiFi story about what the religious mind wants and craves for- very good
G.B.S. - Mark V • (1976)- interesting story about how it might be in a long space travel and how it is to be different in their environment
The Utterly Perfect Murder (1971)-not a bad story about what we think about when we age & what we are sorry about
Punishment Without Crime (1950)- interesting story about where crime starts- at the thought? when you raise your hand? when you strike?
Getting Through Sunday Somehow (1962)- didn't like it too much
Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds (1976)- A story about how we make decisions, and the regrets we have after
Interval in Sunlight (1954)- didn't like this story much, the bully husband doesn't let his wife live her life+ it's a long story
A Story of Love (1976)-[ variant of These Things Happen (1951)]- very touching story about young love & our thinking about what was when we were young
The Wish (1973)- another story about regrets & what we miss
Forever and the Earth (1950)- an interesting SiFi story, ok but not great
The Better Part of Wisdom (1976)-another story about aging and our regrets
Darling Adolf (1976)- a daring idea about what acting means & how it affects the actor+ what the 'masses' do
The Miracles of Jamie (1946)- another story about how children build fantasies & how they recover from the inevitable reality that hits them in the face
The October Game (1948)- a story with a dark twist- about how revenge makes un inhuman
The Pumpernickel (1951)- not a SiFi story but it's super good about what aging does to us & how we cope with it
Long After Midnight (1963)- an ok story about what people think about situations & how they change when the situation isn't as it appears
Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! (1973)- very cute story about how people cope with their limits

Would have given it 6 stars if I could

My second favorite book of short stories (Pump Six is my #1), I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Bradbury's stories carry so much variety that they always shock you and never get old.

Listened to a few of these stories and couldn't get into it. They were all very ok.

This is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury that I read long ago, but sometimes I simply come back to it and re-read my favorites.
From Sci-fi to fantasy to mild horror, they have an amazing range of tone, rythm and flow, and whenever you're in the mood for a quick but still amazing read that will most likely mess up your mind for the next few hours, this is the right collection to choose (or any form of collection by Ray Bradbury, as I'm afraid this was a version only published in Italy).
I was in high school the first time I read this, and I remember thinking that this man's style was so awesome, I would have liked to write like him. It was my inspiration for a long long time, and it probably still is.
His words can captivate you in so little lines that when it's over you're left thinking "noooo, I want more!" and it doesn't matter whether you were intrigued, fascinated or disturbed (because that comes across as well), you'll miss the sensation.

I don’t like short story anthologies. Oh, I read them from time to time, I just almost always end up disappointed. Kind of like every time Christmas rolls around and you see those chocolate medley gift boxes and think to yourself, “I should try one of those. Maybe it won’t taste like burnt hair this time.”

There are multiple reasons for my dislike of short story compilations, not the least of which is the structure of the stories themselves. See the handy-dandy diagram!

I imagine most of you have seen something like this before. It’s called Freytag’s triangle, and it illustrates the elements of plot as they happen in most stories. There’s the exposition (characters are introduced, the plot gets rolling, etc.), rising action (things start to heat up), climax (the action/conflict is brought to a boil), denouement (the temperature is cranked down), and the final resolution. It’s worked this way since the days of classical Greek drama, though more attention was given to the denouement in those days, with the climax generally occurring in the middle of the play. The classical Freytag’s Triangle doesn’t look like a pyramid built by a bunch of drunk Egyptians.

What you see in the chart above is a more accurate representation of modern fiction, but it still serves as a great illustration of why short stories pose such an aggravation for me. In the “rising action” portion of the plot line, the pace of the narrative slowly picks up, as does the pace at which the audience reads (because they get excited about what’ll happen next). I don’t know about the rest of you out there, but my reading speed is greatly dependent upon this buildup. I read slower as I’m getting into the book and pick up steam as the action escalates. But imagine doing that over and over again inside of a 300 page book and you’ll start to understand my frustration. Oh, and then there’s the fact that most of the time in short stories, that triangle of Freytag’s is really just a huge honkin’ cliff. Climax, bam, done, and we start over again. So that constant speeding up and slowing down really cramps my style and makes it seem like it’s taking forever to get through the book. Mostly because it is.

And then there are other complications. Take, for instance, one of my recent reads, Ray Bradbury’s Long After Midnight. As is with most anthologies, not all short stories included in the collection are created equally. Some of them are mind-bogglingly good. Some of them make your eyes cross with the sheer pointlessness of them. You would think that, being such a world-renowned writer, even Ray Bradbury’s worst stories should still be tolerable. And you would be wrong. What I found out after the fact is that Long After Midnight was the literary equivalent of a “New Jersey Turnpike.” Don’t know what that is? It’s number 4 on this list of the 17 worst shots ever created. Read, laugh, and be disgusted.

Anyhow, the creation of Long After Midnight went down something like this: by 1976 Bradbury had 16 short story anthologies to his credit, but in the publication of those works there were a few stories that got left out of the mix. Either they didn’t fit with the overall milieu of the collection or there wasn’t enough room for another story or they just weren’t good enough. Take your pick. Some enterprising publishing exec (or, who knows, maybe even Bradbury himself) decided that all these derelict needed to have a home of their own, so they mopped them up with the proverbial bar rag and squeezed them into a shot glass, slapped the label Long After Midnight onto the side, and sent it out to the masses for public consumption. Therefore, none of the stories make sense with one other.

Given the cover of the book, I was also expecting a sci-fi anthology. I mean, look at it! Who wouldn’t be expecting a heady rush of mind-expanding sci-fi goodness if they saw that cover? But in reality, only a third of the stories included were even tangentially related to science fiction. Far more prevalent were the tales of young love and friendship and old love and family—you know, uninteresting crap. I’m kidding, of course. Those are all worthwhile subjects for fiction; it’s just that the reversal of expectations was extremely off-putting. It’s kind of like putting a video in the VCR that you thought was Saving Private Ryan and finding out someone had taped it over with Fried Green Tomatoes—both good movies in their own rights, but for totally different reasons that appeal to totally different tastes. Now imagine that the recording of Fried Green Tomatoes has been spliced with alternating snippets and vignettes cut from a Lifetime movie, and you’ll have a fair approximation of what reading Long After Midnight was like.

Overall, I give the book three out of five stars. The only—and I repeat, only—reason it didn’t get two stars was because of the few stories that genuinely took my breath away. Brilliance lurks within Long After Midnight. You just have to wade through a lot of trash to get there—not unlike the real New Jersey Turnpike, if you think about it.

http://readabookonce.blogspot.com/201...

Though a bit dated, this book is full of a good mix of stories, really showcasing the talent that was Ray Bradbury! Some stories were okay, some were great! He was agead of his time too, so good at what he did! I'm sure I'll revisit some of these stories at some point!

Reading Ray Bradbury in the summer (at the age of twenty) feels like an act of preservation—a chance to look back at teenage summers through the eyes of characters old enough to have torn their lives apart in an attempt to run back to (or even further from) those moments. It's a chance to anticipate growing out of adolescence while still recognizing that there's a chance to change it all—ya know? Bradbury's allegorical writing style lends itself well to living in these moments, and of course, I don't know if there's anyone better at writing about being a boy.

I like Bradbury writing about love, and he does it really well here on multiple occasions. "A Story of Love," "One Timeless Spring," "The Better Part of Wisdom," and even "The Miracles of Jamie" all fall into this category and make me feel things.

"The October Game," just...man.