Today's normal blogging is interrupted to discuss the passing of Ray Bradbury.

I was a late comer to Bradbury and Vonnegut, and I got to them by falling through Ellison.  During my youth, I spent a lot of time with Asimov and Adams.  The stories were more accessible and funnier.  And shorter.

Sometimes I wonder if that last part has continued to impact the way I think.  I have always found it difficult to get quickly into a book or move through it at any speed.  I can pile through articles , but novels and long journal pieces take serious work.  I've had to gear up to cope with the longer reading as I've moved through school, padding the work with notes and underlines, just to keep up with the narrative.

It's not that I don't like reading.  But something seems lost on me when it takes so much effort to process the words and pull the story out of them.

So, I would likely never become one that memorizes a book from end to end.  Do you think they enjoyed the story?  Do you think they liked the words?  Probably not, as the were just a memorized sequence.  Maybe that work would make me the perfect person to be a memorizer.