Puss Reboots: Blog: October 2007: The Halloween Tree

Recent posts

Reviews:
Against the Current by Robert Silverberg
Alice, the Cat Who Was Hounded by Jules Rosenthal
And Then What Happened Paul Revere? by Jean Fritz
Arizona by Clarence Budingham Kelland
Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton
Barren Lives by Gracilliano Ramos
Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear by Nancy White Carlstrom
Bleach Volume 2 by Tite Kubo
Bleach Volume 3 by Tite Kubo
The Boy Who Wanted to be a Fish by Le Grand
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Can't Wait to Get to Heaven by Fannie Flagg
Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Eight by Katherine Neville Gag by Lovechild
The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury
Hide and Ghost Seek by Carol Thompson
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
How to Deal with Difficult People by Andrew Costello
I Went to the Animal Fair by William Cole and Colette Rosselli The Key by Joe Vitale
The Long Valley by John Steinbeck
Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H. F. Saint
Motherhood, the Second Oldest Profession by Erma Bombeck
Mousekin's Family by Edna Miller
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House by Eric Hodgins
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
My Summer with George by Marilyn French
Sail Away by Donald Crews
Sailaway Home by Bruce Degen
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Shooting Polaris by John Hales
Small Pig by Arnold Lobel
The Storm by Sarah Zimmerman
Strange Mr. Satie by M. T. Anderson and Petra Mathers
Turtle's Flying Lesson by Diane Redfield Massie
The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos
The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs
Who Goes There? by Dorothy P. Lathrop

Previous month

The Halloween Tree: 10/24/07

The Halloween Tree is my favorite Ray Bradbury book; Something Wicked This Way Comes comes in at a close second. It is another of a short list of books I've read more times than I can count. With Halloween coming up, I enjoyed a nice afternoon of rereading it.

Ray Bradbury's tale is the Halloween equivalent to Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Bradbury cements this comparison by giving Moundshroud's house a "Marley knocker." While the three Christmas spirits are there to redeem Scrooge so that he can save Tim Cratchet, here a group of friends must face their fears to save the life of their friend Pipkin.

In only 150 pages (with illustrations), Bradbury takes the boys through a brief history of Halloween and all the traditions that have come to make the holiday as it is celebrated in the United States. The boys travel around the world and through time over the course of six hours.

If you haven't read this departure from Bradbury's usual style of story telling, read it.