Hilary's book blog experiment

I read too much and too fast. I write too little and too slowly. This might help both problems. Inspired by Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading and a longstanding desire to track what I read.

February 26, 2004

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, 2003.

Very enjoyable--an unusual blend of science fiction and general-fiction-bordering-on-romance. The time traveler is Henry, punk-rock-loving librarian (how could I not read this book?), who has Chrono-Displacement Disorder; when he's stressed, he vanishes from the present and re-appears, naked, in another time (often one that's meaningful to him, seldom more than a few decades away). His wife is Clare, who first meets Henry when she is 6 and he is 36; he first meets her in real time when he is 28 and she is 20. Niffenegger ( I love that name!) brings out both the strangeness and the normalcy of this tangled, predestined?, deeply loving relationship. It's not particularly good SF qua SF (although much better written than most), but as straight fiction it's terrific. One of the things Henry does when back in the past, aside from hanging out with his younger self, is going to rock concerts he missed the first time around. I can't think of a concert I particularly regret off the top of my head, but I would go see Ursula LeGuin speak in 1983--can't believe I was foolish enough to pass that up the first time around.