Fiction Switch

I just finished two books, both of which I highly recommend. The first - a nice, short book by Ray Bradbury entitled Fahrenheit 451. You may be familiar with it through the movie (1966) of the same name. I enjoyed both the movie and the book. It has inspired me to switch over to fiction for a time, for a change of pace. As a great lover of books and libraries, the book resonated with me (the frequency of the book matched some inner-miniarms frequency). The author's point in writing the book is open to various interpretations.....to illustrate the evil of the suppression of opposing views through censorship, for example. Bradbury himself has stated that the novel is not about censorship, but "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature". Interestingly enough, the wife of the main character in the book is constantly found with some type of music player in her ear, oblivious to what is going on around her....isolated from the reality of her existence. Ipods and cell phones anyone? This book was first published in 1953! The second - the Memoirs of U.S. Grant, a much more daunting read. Did I like the book? My thoughts are in line with this quote from Random House regarding the book: "Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant's is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically "rescued" him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man, told with great courage as he reflects on the fortunes that shaped his life and his character. Written under excruciating circumstances (as Grant was dying of throat cancer), encouraged and edited from its very inception by Mark Twain, it is a triumph of the art of autobiography." For anyone with an interest in the Civil War, this is a must read.