The Illustrated Man

I remember when I bought this book in my youth, and I have read it numerous times since. The Illustrated Man is a 1951 short story collection by Ray Bradbury. If you're a science fiction/fantasy fan or if you like Ray Bradbury I'm sure you've read this at least once. If not, I'd encourage you to give it a try. They're short stories, after all, and easy to start and then skip to the next one if you're not engaged. There's a variety here, so it's entirely possible to like one and not another of them.

from the dust jacket:

Here are twenty stories, welded in a delightfully ingenious framework, in which "the incomparable Ray Bradbury," as reviewers have called him, again kicks loose his wonderful imagination and lets it soar through space and time to seek out the weird and the lovely, the simple and the terrible, in his fellow man.

Here are stories of other worlds:

• Of love and inspiration on Mars-
• Of madness in Venus's eternal rains-
• Of lonely death in space between worlds-
• And of the little villages of our own world where there are strange things we never notice and strange beings we never meet.

But like all Bradbury stories, these are always tales of people, written with the freshness and quality which have brought the author widespread critical acclaim.

It was adapted for film in 1969, and though that was a fine enough film (with Rod Steiger in the title role) it doesn't hold a candle to the book. There's a new production in Development Hell.

Conceptual Fiction concludes,

It is worth remembering that this author, whose life spanned the period from the introduction of the Model T Ford to the most modern and streamlined hybrid vehicles, never learned to drive a car. He is a proud technophobe who also scorns computers, the Internet and ATMs. But you don’t need a driver’s license to traverse the galaxy in your imagination. And for that, Ray Bradbury is the first person you would want behind the wheel.

The C.S. Monitor names it as one of Bradbury's best. SF Site praises it and says, "Re-reading The Illustrated Man for this review was no chore, any more than viewing yet another Monet painting. It is a true classic." Kirkus Reviews calls it "A book which is not limited by its special field."