Finding a Good Read: Time to read
A column to help you find intriguing books
Having the opportunity to experience different historical periods, or see your alternate life paths, could be fun and satisfying – being trapped in an infinite time loop probably isn’t.
Playing with the concept of time makes for quirky, funny and sometimes just baffling plots – Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) is considered as much a puzzle as it is a story.
If I could turn back time
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) is credited as the first popular time travel book.
11/22/63 (Stephen King) and The Man Who Folded Himself (David Gerrold) offer thoughtful, if quite stressful, considerations on how this power could be used.
Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) and The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) are slightly soapier takes on the concept. Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi) is a heartwarming variation on the idea.
Back to the future
Usually checking what happens at the end of the book before starting to read it is considered a cheat. Stories that run backwards in time let you do this guilt-free.
The Night Watch (Sarah Waters) and Time’s Arrow (Martin Amis) both take their stories from finish to start.
The short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (F. Scott Fitzgerald) takes the concept one step further, with a main character who ages backwards.
Can’t escape the book
Repeating the same day (or life) over and over again is usually a nightmare for the character experiencing it and great fun for the reader.
This device is used in different ways and with different results in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Claire North), The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton), Replay (Ken Grimwood), and On the Calculation of Volume (Solvej Balle).
Kindred (Octavia E. Butler) uses the idea to explore the theme of slavery. Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) emphasises the importance of living in the moment, even if those moments aren’t when they are meant to be.
What might have been
Finding out what your life could look like if your actions, tiny or huge, had been different is a great fiction trope.
Festive classic A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) is a famous exploration of this theme.
The companion piece to Kate Atkinson’s time-looping Life After Life, A God In Ruins explores what might have happened to her main character if it had not been for a World War. Light Perpetual (Francis Spufford) looks at the same topic.
While Recursion (Blake Crouch) focuses on a corporate mystery of memory manipulation, The Midnight Library (Matt Haig) is an uplifting story about how it’s never too late to alter a life path gone awry.
The never-ending story
Keeping a character alive for centuries is a great way of exploring time periods without introducing too many new people. How to Stop Time (Matt Haig) and Orlando (Virginia Woolf) do this expertly.
Memories
Even a normal approach to time can trigger a lot of emotions – particularly when musing on how fast it passes. Regret, nostalgia, joy and hope all make for great story drivers.
Kazuo Ishiguro masters this area, with The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go both offering gorgeous and heartbreaking reflections on life. The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes) also looks at how life can be shaped by unreliable memories.
Time and its passing is integral to both The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) and One Day (David Nicholls), and their tales of love over many years remain popular on the page and the screen.
With thanks to Give a Book and PRG volunteer Erin
“Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” is a modern book which addresses agonising past misunderstandings in a new mythical way. Each continuing sufferer gets to return to that exact time in their past, by time-transportation from a unique magical Japanese café. Then they can stay in that past “until their (pre-leaving )cup of coffee gets cold.” These short “returning” stories show as having left each time-traveller feeling better, – often after discovering some redeeming feature which was not originally understood. From the very popular original book in Japanese, it suggests perhaps that past suffering, can yield to more generous present thought.