Today is the Summer Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) the longest day of the year. For some it’s the mid-point of summer, for others it’s the first day of summer. To celebrate this milestone in the year and to honor the late Ray Bradbury, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dandelion Wine. There have been several really excellent tributes to Bradbury in the weeks since his death, one the best being the series of short takes by Gary Wolfe, John Clute, Brian Attebery, and Rob Latham in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Wolfe notes “Bradbury seems to provoke a kind of visceral nostalgia that makes any effort to assess his place in science fiction or in literature almost irrelevant; he was at least as much a part of our personal histories as of literary and cultural history.” Wolfe then of course, goes on to quite succinctly summarize Bradbury’s importance to SF and literature in general. I think Wolfe’s piece is generally right on, and his acknowledgment that there is something personal in our responses is particularly on point.

I’ve never read Dandelion Wine before, but just a little ways in and I’m (not surprisingly) impressed and caught up in the novel. I’ve always thought that Bradbury was at his best when giving himself a long lyrical-leash, as he does in much of his work in October Country as well as Something Wicked This Way Comes and the strangely beautiful From the Dust Returned.

Dandelion Wine (thus far) captures perfectly the feeling of endless freedom, glorious expectation, and eternal youth that summer portends as a child. And yet, the book does not lapse into nostalgia for it is too honest for that. It is nice to listen to Bradbury wax lyrical about those endless days, the possibilities that the world seems to allow. And the danger and darkness too, the sure acknowledgment that summer is can be filled with the same uneasy things which haunt the October Country. As one of the novel’s young protagonists states to his brother “the ravine at night don’t belong in Mr. Auffman’s Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it.”

Of other summer literary interest, The Poetry Foundation has a nice selection of Summer Poems posted here. An apt poem considering the date and the kind of childhood remembrances that Bradbury brings up is Robert Fitzgerald’s “Midsummer.” It’s a lovely piece. As for me, I’m going to spend part of this evening at the Temple Terrace Community Garden, getting my hands appropriately dirty.