A Summer with Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was hoping to do a summer ‘book club’ of sorts, using Ray Bradbury’s SciFi classic, The Martian Chronicles. Since The Martian Chronicles is really a collection of short stories even more than a novel, it lends itself to being read in chunks pretty well.

What I’d like to do here is outline the schedule for the posts, so if you want to read along each week, you know what the post will cover. My plan is to post once each weekend, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend. In the list below, I’ve given the date for the Friday of the weekend in question, as well as the portion of the book that week’s post will cover. (The posts may not always come on Friday, in fact, my guess is they usually won’t, but this seems the simplest way of giving the schedule.)

5/23 – Intro to Ray Bradbury & The Martian Chronicles
5/30 – “Rocket Summer” and “Ylla”
6/6 – “The Summer Night” and “The Earth Men”
6/13 – “The Taxpayer” and “The Third Expedition”
6/20 – ” – And the Moon be Still as Bright”
6/27 – “The Settlers,” “The Green Morning,” “The Locusts” and “Night Meeting”
7/4 – “The Shore,” “Interim,” “The Musicians,” and “Way in the Middle of the Air”
7/11 – “The Naming of Names” and “Usher II”
7/18 – “The Old Ones” and “The Martian”
7/25 – “The Luggage Store” and “The Off Season”
8/1 – “The Watchers” and “The Silent Towns”
8/8 – “The Long Years”
8/15 – There Will Come Soft Rains”
8/22 – “The Million Year Picnic”
8/29 – Final Reflection

I hope you’ll pick up a copy of this classic work and join me for some summer reading. Feel free to participate each week with your own comments, questions and insights in the comments.

Next week, I’ll post a little bit about Bradbury, about the significance of The Martian Chronicles and about the epigraph to the book, which I dearly love.