It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚

I have been addicted to books since around the fifth grade

You can read the longish introduction to the series in either

Let’s Talk BOOKS 2023-04-02 Genre: Romance

Let’s Talk BOOKS 2023-04-16 Genre: Mystery & Thrillers 

Other previous editions of Let’s Talk BOOKS: Let's Talk BOOKS 2023-04-23 Genre: YA (Young Adult)It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚 May 7, 2023 Genre: Detective  It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚 May 21, 2023 Genre: Science Fiction  It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚 May 28, 2023 Genre: MilSpec 

Genre — Time Travel 

Of all genres, over the long decades of my reading life, my most favorite stories involve time travel of one sort or another. It can be via relativity and starships, via a Curse or Spell, via a time machine or any other number of time portals. Because in a time travel story you never know just when your protagonist will end up. 

Diana Gabaldon— Outlander series

A research Professor at Arizona State U for twelve years, Gabaldon had always thought she’d be an author. How did she begin?

From her URL:http://dianagabaldon.com/resources/faq/“I thought I’d write a book for practice, just to learn how, and thought perhaps a historical novel would be the easiest thing for me to write; I was, after all, a research professor—I knew what to do with a library.” 

Over 30 years later, Outlander is comprised of 9 full novels, six companion Lord John Grey novels about a secondary character in the main novels, and a handful of novellas and short stories, all set in the same universe. 

You may be familiar with the series from the TV show of the same name. There is some drift between the two but in truth, as much as I admire the show, for me the books themselves are a much better portal into the pre-Jacobian Era in both England and the American Colonies. Since Gabaldon was a research professor, she has done a huge amount of research for this series. Which gives the reader a real look into life in the mid-1700s. 

The time travel in Outlander is a bit of mystery even after all of this time. The standing stones at Craigh na Dun in Scotland and others set in two places, one in the original 13 colonies and another in a rock chamber on an island in the Caribbean, are where Claire and others cross between times. Somehow when they get near those stones, they can hear the portal through which they will travel if they touch those standing rocks.

Jodi Taylor— The Chronicles of St Mary’s& The Time Police series

Often Time Travel is a serious adventure filled with danger and action. Jodi Taylor took that premise and turned it on it’s head in this outlandish and hilarious series about a group of Time Traveling historians. 

An Amazon reviewer has a much better blurb than I could ever write, this is the reviewer’s own blog: https://random-redhead-ramblings.tumblr.com/

St Mary's is bonkers, good bonkers. Long story short it follows our female protagonist Max as she joins the secretive St Mary's Institute of Historical Research. This is not a place where the Historians sit over dusty books and scrolls, no they live it.

Yes they have freaking time machines!!

Every time I finish a new St Mary’s book, I can’t wait for the next one. 

The adjacent Time Police series covers an organization which operates up and down the timeline but not in step with the historians at St Mary’s, in fact the two orgs meet at times and those moments are sometimes explosive. They are the Time Police and their job is to ensure the timeline does not get tampered with and when they find someone trying to do so, no one goes home happy. It is critical to know that the son of one of the St Mary’s historians is one of the 3 main characters in the Time Police. 

The time travel in Taylor’s books are machines built specifically for time travel. No method of the actual travel is ever discussed. You enter a Pod, enter your time & space coordinates in the computer and et voila, off you go!

Michael Crichton— Timeline standalone novel

To start, the novel IS the basis for the film Timeline, starring Gerard Butler, but the novel is strictly a science fiction time travel machine story. Not a rambunctious star crossed love story. 

Most people know Crichton from his Jurassic Park stories or his thrillers. But for me Timeline was his best work. When he describes the desert scene where a time-traveled man is dying from damage done to his body during that travel, you can feel the heat and the burning sand. 

Evil-ish rich guy seeking a way to get richer, wants to look to the past for his next fortune. Paradox and the unwritten laws of the Universe have something to say about that plan. A terrific read. About time I gave this book another go and then watch the film afterwards, because after all, who doesn’t love a rambunctious star crossed love story with Gerard Butler in it? 

Connie Willis— Oxford Time Travel series

                             Fire Watch, The Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, All Clear

To Say Nothing of the Dog: Imagine traveling decades back in time to look for disturbing pieces of statuary and wrought iron in 1940s England during the Blitz of WWII. From that premise, Connie Willis takes you on a morbid and hilarious romp through time. 

What Willis does best in these stories is she makes the past come to life, often in bleak and dire circumstances, and sometimes in hilariously odd moments. 

I spent years trying to convince my local used book store owner to read The Doomsday Book, although I was never successful. Imagine someone telling you the best book they’d read in a decade was about a young woman who time travels to a small English town about to be hit by the Black Plague, where everyone she has met will die a horrible death. But it is a remarkable tale, as are the rest of the series. 

Stephen King— 11/22/63 standalone novel

A common theme in time travel tales is the idea of going back in time to stop Hitler. King flipped that idea on it’s head and posited a man who found a doorway (much like the one the Pevensie children find in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) into the past, but only to a certain day in the past. 

That man decides that he has found that doorway so that he can prevent the assassination of President John F Kennedy. 

From King’s URL on the book: https://stephenking.com/works/novel/11-22-63.html

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.