One Girl's Books

About Time

I am a sucker for time-travel stories.

I've been intrigued by the concept since I was a kid. Backwards in time; forwards; whatever. The following provides a small sampling of some of my favorite time-travel tales.

The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger  - This is the class of the group. An extremely well-written and beautiful book. It took the first 50 pages to get used to the time shifting, but after that the story of Clare and Henry really moved me. Henry suffers from Chrono-Displacement Disorder which  causes him to move involuntarily through time.  It is during one of those time shifts that he meets a young Clare who years later becomes his wife. Don't hold it against the book that book clubs all over the country have this on their reading list. Here.

Time and Again by Jack Finney - I think this was the first time travel novel I ever read. Si goes back to 1880s New York with the help of a mysterious government agency. Finney wrote a couple sequels because people loved the book so much. It's a classic. Here.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis - Maybe it's just me, but a story involving Victorian manners, the bombing of Coventry during WWII, time travel and Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat can't miss.  I read this in 2001 for the first time and have picked it up three or four times since.  It's a comedy science fiction mystery. One of my favorites. Here.

Also....

Shortcut in Time - This is a very low-key novel. An alleyway provides the "gateway" for time travel. But the travel is only 15 minutes back. I enjoyed the concept. Here.

The Diana Gabaldon Outlander series is very popular too. Not a lot of time travel, but good romance. The first one is probably the best. Here.

The Number 42

Didn't make it to Comic-Con, but it got me thinking about Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Adams' books were my first taste of the comic possibilities in science fiction. The books are ridiculous in the best possible sense of the word. To this day I am convinced that the answer to life the universe and everything might be the number 42.

It is a series I think kids might especially enjoy, but I doubt many teens and pre-teens would be likely to pick it up. I think anyone going through Harry Potter withdrawals might enjoy the series with its translating Babel fish, the hapless Arthus Dent and other crazy characters.

The whole series is on sale right now at Amazon.Here.

Neal Stephenson Angries (Angrys?) Me Up in the Blood

So back in maybe 1988 in college while wasting time at Northtown Books in Acta, I  found a copy of The Big U. by Neal Stephenson. It was on the bargain table and was marked down to like $1.50. The cover had a cartooney picture of a cheerleader type in a college dorm room reading a book that had a picture of a cheerleader type in a college dorm room reading a book and so on. I found a terribly muddy version and posted it here.  I vividly recall reading the description on the back and being totally sucked in. It starts, "One flew over the animal house..." It's a big, silly book about life on a giant college campus.

I read it right away and it became one of my favorites. I passed it along to many friends (including some that tried to kidnap it after finding out that it was out of print).

  I tracked down Zodiac soon after and loved that too. Then came  the highly influential Snow Crash (love, love, love) and The Diamond Age (somewhat conflicted love, love, love).  The Big U was whispered about on fan sites, Stephenson completely degrades the book and doesn't even include it on the list of books he has written on his website. Copies were selling on ebay for hundreds! He finally agreed to reprint in in 2001, with a new, lamer cover.

In 1999 Stephenson published Cryptonomicon, another brilliant book, featuring  And then, something terrible happened. He started sucking! I bought Quicksilver the day it came out. Still can't finish it. I have tried and tried.

What do you do when one of your favorite authors fails you?

Philip K. Dick News

This week's N.Y. Times Review of Books has an article about a new Philip K. Dick anthology called Four Novels of the 1960s. The anthology features The Man in The High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Peter Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik. What a fantastic collection. I liked Valis a lot, but it didn't make the cut.

Reviewer Dave Itzkoff says, "Somehow the discovery that your personal heroes are, in fact, everyone's idols is less comforting than it is traumatic."

Well said.

Read the full article here.