Author: Ray Bradbury
Source: Bought
Published: 1951

I read Fahrenheit 451 last year, and that was my very first Bradbury book – I fell in love with it so much that I had to try some more of his works. The Illustrated Man revolved around a large tattooed man who’s tattoos predict the future and all that will happen in the world, these are then translated into a selection of different stories from in and around the world depicting the stories that have been coming true from the illustrations on this mans back.

Before I started, I didn’t realise that this book was a selection of short stories and I was in fact very pleasantly surprised. Each story had it’s own moral to bring to the reader through thought provoking story telling from the masterful Bradbury – I felt as though each chapter had something that I could take from the book and apply to life at the moment. The fact that it was being written in a dystopian world made you see what could happen in the future if you don’t take heed of the things that went wrong in this book.

As much as I loved the morals in the stories, from about half way onwards, they started to become a little bit too preachy for my likings; morals were being chucked at you as if you didn’t have a choice and would be stupid not to take note of them and I didn’t like that. It was just starting to become a little too much.

At the beginning, the stories linked in with the all round idea that these were tattoos on an illustrated man, but as the stories progressed we didn’t hear anything of that man until the last chapter which I did find to be a little disappointing as I would have liked it to have all pulled together a little more. I haven’t read too many short stories, and I did enjoy that concept of it with the dystopian sci-fi feel they all gave, but I just felt as though it started to drag towards the end. I cannot fault Bradbury’s beautiful writing though, as it is just so enthralling and readable, but there was just something about this book that didn’t quite make it.