I have just finished reading the Swallow Bookworms' January choice.
For once I am able to say that it was a really engrossing read, and a quick scan of websites suggests that this is an opinion shared by many readers. Mind you, I have read what appear to be universally favourable reviews of books that were complete rubbish, so that doesn't prove much. One of the things I admired was the strong grip the author kept on the whole plot and the complex time-scheme - she must have had calendars and charts all over the walls of her study or maybe they were all stored on the computer, but keeping track as she wrote can have been no easy task. Possibly even more remarkable is that she manages to make the whole improbable plot seem really quite possible.
I have to admit that I have been a fan of time travel fiction since I was a little girl: E Nesbit's "The Amulet", "The House of Arden" and "Harding's Luck" were constant rereads from the age of six, and were soon joined by Alison Utteley's "A Traveller in Time", Philippa Pearce's "Tom's Midnight Garden", Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" (less of a favourite) and numerous lesser tales which straddled the magic/science fiction divide. By my teens I had added numerous short stories by John Wyndham, Jack Finney and Poul Andersson to my list of favourites, and, of course, J. B. Priestley's three time plays as well as his magnificent "Man and Time", which is credited in Audrey Niffenegger's acknowledgements as one of her inspirations. In my late teens I had the pleasure of acting Carol Conway in "Time and the Conways".
Films and television never quite did it for me in the same way: "Dr. Who" and "Time Tunnel" were certainly both on my childhood mustn't miss list, but later exploits in the same vein as well as adaptaions of books and stories have never done it for me in the way that the written word does, as the subtleties of small chrono-imponderables tends to be replaced with action scenes, big-time villains and strange mcguffins.
I would like to imagine that time travel really is a possibility, yet the thought of how proof of that concept would alter our whole perception of personal self-determination is seriously scary.
Anyway, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is very much recommended, and I hope that the forthcoming film manages to retain the delicate touch of a book in which the subtlety of plotting is only marginally lost at the very end.
jollyweez
I have always liked the concept of Time Travel. Not to go forward but to be able to go back, to live my childhood all over again so happy with my grandmother in Somerset for the first ten years of life. I would have been so much kinder to her. She had such bad luck with men and with her only daughter, my mother. Her first husband, Albert, left for Gallipoli three days after their wedding. He was killed at Suvla Bay a month later and his body was never found. The man who brought back her photo found in his jacket was my grandfather who asked her to marry him a few weeks later. He was wounded badly by shrapnel and died eight years later. He had been awarded eight medals including the Croix de Guerre trying to pull the wounded back into his trench. Then my mother, born in 1918, married at eighteen, had two children; my brother and I (1942) She left me with my grandmother and went to seek her fortune in the hotel industry. Would give anything to go back and listen to her stories, find her letters from Gallipoli and hide them somewhere until I was old enough to appreciate them.
There is also the Fourth Dimension where it is said that all the lives that ever lived are still going through the life they lived at each moment. That includes you and me. To b able to pick that time we want to live in again and go back.
Science Fiction books used to handle all Time Travel in a most intelligent way too. I read a lot as a teenager.