TIOLI November Read a Book About Time Travel Challenge

Challenge #17: Read a book about or featuring time travel

I had 3/4 books which I wanted to read which I thought would fit this category, then I did a tag search for time travel and discovered that I have absolutely loads of books that would fit.

Books on LT tagged 'time travel'

You won't have to read a hard science fiction book to fit this challenge. There are lots of more main stream books which feature time travel in some form.

Some examples are:

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and other books in the series
The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegurt

Children's books:

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones

As well as some more traditional science fiction books like:

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

And non-fiction books about time travel would also count like How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies

If that's not enough then Connie Willis has written a whole load of books featuring time travelling historians

Please feel free to use this thread to comment on which books you're planning to read, ask questions and/or discuss the books you're reading about time travel.

I loved the baseball-related time travel book, If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. Read it years ago, so I plan to read his second baseball time travel book, Two in the Field for next month.

I was thinking about making time travel a category for 11 in 11 but decided that 11 books for this topic would be too much for me. You've got lots of great ideas though.

It's amazing that there are so many. A good children's/YA title is A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, in which a girl travels back to the Elizabethan era and finds herself on the fringes of the Babington rebellion and meets Mary Queen of Scots. I think that book fueled my interest in time travel, at least as far as exploring the past is concerned (less interest in the future...) and The House on the Strand simply confirmed it.

But I admit I didn't much enjoy The Time Traveler's Wife. The mechanics of it all were too complex and baffling; every time I thought I had it figured out, I was flummoxed and I ultimately became so frustrated by that, that I couldn't just relax and enjoy the story. Also didn't much like the movie.

Susan Price's The Sterkham Handshake & Alison Goodman's Singing the Dogstar Blues are both really good YA time travel novels. The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories is an excellent anthology of time-related short stories by many respected scifi writers such as Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury and Arthur Clarke.
I might try The House on the Strand, just that I've signed up for so many reads already.

edit:I'l keep trying to get touchstones to work.

I've signed up for a ridiculous # as well; but it's interesting to see which ones have become group reads! I'll prioritize those, and the ones I want to finish for my 1010 and off-the-shelf challenges, and then everything else is catch-as-catch-can...

The Time Traveller's Wife is listed for challenge 1. I also recommend the Alison Uttley. Other children's classics are Charlotte Sometimes and one of the books about the children from Five Children and It - not sure if it's The Phoenix and the Carpet or The Story of the Amulet.

If you haven't read the following book, I utterly recommend it. I'm not sure how it relates to time travel, but I think it does. It starts with a man who is born as an old man who gets younger as his life progresses.

No, it's not about Benjamin Button. The book is The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a book which I loved. The author is Andrew Sean Greer. I'm now on the look-out for more books by this same author. Hope some of you choose it and enjoy it as much as I did!

Yup I listed The Time Traveller's Wife for challenge 1 - in my defence challenge #17 wasn't up when I posted it! I will talk about it here along with the other time travel books I've decided to read: House on the Strand, Doomsday and Making History.

It seems that I like time travel books when I go to the LT list based on tagging I have read or have in my TBR a lot of them.... Most notably the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series which I started reading when I was 16 and still buy each new release in the series!

Off to go look at Max Tivoli....

Find-it-later post

Ah, I don't see one of my favorites anywhere - Time and Again by Jack Finney. The passage from the book where he walks out of the Dakota building on 72nd Street in New York and (finally) into the Central Park in the 1880's is still, to me, one of the great passages from literature (at least literature about time travel). It is so visual, auditory, and sensory a piece of writing, that you feel as if the snowflakes are tickling your cheeks and you can see the gas lamps flickering along the snow-covered walkway. Time truly seems suspended, and you feel as if you are floating. The fact that this first experimental foray is only temporary and he wakes up among the hustle and bustle of modern Manhattan the next morning just adds to the magic. This novel also happens to be both a great Mystery and a great Romance, spread out across the different time periods in NYC. Highly recommended.

Does The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones count as a time travel book?

I haven't read that book, but I see that others have tagged it as "time travel" so I would think so.

OK, good. I will add it to the wiki.

ETA: Went to update the wiki and discovered it is a shared read, so points will go along with it. Woot!

#10 I absolutely love Time and Again. It's probably my all-time favorite book. I'm about due for a re-read as it's been awhile since I last re-read it.

If you want a time travel book which is very much "tongue-in-cheel" try Robert Silverberg's Up the Line. WARNING: Not for children.

#14 I was just thinking the same thing!

Maybe I'll add it to the wiki then. No guarantees that I'll get to it--my focus this month is on finishing 1010 and there's no place for Time and Again there.

Thanks for all the recommendations and ideas (although it has resulted in me adding even more books to my wishlist - grumble, grumble).

#8 kiwiflowa, we're more than happy for you to keep The Time Traveler's Wife under challenge #1 (in fact I think Madeline might get upset if we asked you to move it!)

#10 I almost included Time and Again in my list in msg #1 but left it out for some reason. I don't have a copy so I won't be reading it this month but it's definitely on my list to read someday.

#11 I included The Homeward Bounders based on the tags. I haven't read any of the books I've listed this month so I'm hoping the tags are all accurate!

I finished my first book for this challenge, The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones. It's an older children's book in which a young boy is forced to travel through time and space by mysterious higher beings who are playing some sort of game with the lives of everyone living on the different worlds.

I enjoyed this one but I didn't think it was the best book I've read by the author.

I finished The Smithsonian Institution by Gore Vidal. This was a really fun read. It's set in 1939, and T., a 13-year-old boy in Washington, D.C., gets a mysterious message to show up at the Smithsonian on a holiday. It turns out that T. is a math/physics genius, and he has figured out the key to making the atomic bomb. And the Smithsonian isn't what you think--it's a hotbed of cutting-edge science underneath all the exhibits. Some of the exhibits sort of come to life and they can sort of travel through time. T. gets set up with a lab and makes it his mission to try to travel back in time to a point where he can change events to prevent World War II because he sees (from an exhibit that's about to be set up) his future self as an exhibit in a military diorama, and his future self has been killed in the upcoming war. It's quite an adventure.

#20: Sounds interesting. I will look for that one. Thanks for the recommendation, Carly.

#20 That one sounds interesting Carly. I've also wishlisted it.

Forgot to post here to say that I've finished Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis for this challenged (thoughts on my thread here. I think Doomsday Book is going to be one of my top reads of the year.

I've realised I'm probably not going to manage all the books I was hoping to read for this challenge but I've started Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card and will also hopefully read The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier which is a shared read.