The April 2022 Reading List

 

As I mentioned before, after two months of reading strictly time travel novels, I decided that for April, I'd head off in a different direction. I wanted to read non-time travel books by some of the writers who had made my time travel list. For the most part, I've stuck with that.

There are two exceptions, however.

After having read an article at CNN.com on a report of Harvard University's legacy of slavery since it's founding in 1636, I wanted to read the actual report. A link to the report as a pdf is below. The pdf is 134 pages. I'm counting that as a "book". That report led me to the Booker T. Washington "book" - also linked to below. Next month, I will follow up on this theme with something by W.E.B. Du Bois (to be determined later).

I've reviewed 6 of the books (not including the Washington or Harvard works) and links to those reviews are given below as well.

Declare                                         by Tim Powers
Fledgling                                      by Octavia Butler
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater     by Kurt Vonnegut
The War of the Worlds                  by H.G.Wells
The Massacre of Mankind            by Stephen Baxter
The Story of Slavery                      by Booker T. Washington
Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery
Her Fearful Symmetry                  by Audrey Niffenegger

Her Fearful Symmetry

Having explored the Sci-fi time travel genre this past February and March, one of my top five favorites was Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife  . So it was only natural that, upon my going off in a different direction, Niffenegger's second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry would make the reading list this month.

Just as Octavia Butler had done with fledgling , Niffenegger broke from the time travel genre - Butler writing a vampire novel and Niffenegger writing a ghost story.

Without going too far into the plot, I'll hit some of the high points. Julia and Valentina are 20 year old identical twins - the daughters and nieces of estranged identical twins, Elspeth and Edwina. Early in the novel, Elspeth dies of leukemia and leaves her nieces her flat, located beside Highgate cemetery in London, and slightly more than £2,000,000 with the stipulation that they move from the U.S. to London and live in the flat for one year. The young girls' parents are forbidden to enter the flat.

Niffenegger is a very talented and creative writer, but unfortunately the majority of her work is in the form of so-called "novels in pictures" (visual books) which aren't going to work on a Kindle. According to what I've read online, Niffenegger is currently working on two novels - one is a sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife which was supposed to be ready by 2018 - that's four years ago and we're still waiting. The other novel in progress is The Chinchilla Girl in Exile. No word on it either.

The Time Traveler's Wife

At the bottom of each post, I will post labels to direct folks to other posts that fit into a similar genre - books, and time travel are two examples. There is also a Sci-Fi label, but I'm reluctant to classify Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife as Sci-Fi. Of course, it seems only natural to put any time travel novel in the Sci-Fi category, but this wonderful book is something different.

The person who assembled the 23 Best Time Travel Science Fiction Books list describes The Time Traveler's Wife as "more love story than sci-fi". That's certainly true, but I don't believe anyone should skip this book on that account.

I absolutely loved this book; I'd even go so far as to say it's the best book I've read so far this year.

Like Jack Havig in the last time travel book I read before this one (There Will Be Time ), Henry DeTamble suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel. There are differences, of course. Jack Havig is able to travel at will, Henry DeTamble has no control over his time traveling. Jack is able to carry small items along with him - clothing, money, gold in small amounts. Henry can bring nothing - not even the clothes he's wearing. Neither time traveler can bring another person with him.

The plot summary in the wikipedia article describes the story quite well:
"Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which later comes to be known as Chrono-Impairment. This disorder causes Henry to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the beginning of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life".

As I mentioned in my review of There Will Be Time , the final 25% of that novel contains a story line which I found totally unnecessary. In the ebook edition of The Time Traveler's Wife , the first 25 pages of an upcoming sequel are included. Niffenegger estimated that the book "should be ready in 2018 or so". Unfortunately, it's 2022 and the sequel hasn't been released. I, for one, am looking forward to reading it.