Time and Again by Jack Finney/ The Dutch House by Anne Patchett Audiobook

Leif Enger (Virgil Wander) and David Abrams (Brave Deeds) were talking on Instagram about the 1970 novel Time and Again by Jack Finney. I knew I had it on Kindle (along with hundreds of other ebooks still unread) and so took a look at it.

And I kept on reading. 

I missed this when it came out because I was graduating from high school and going to college at the time of its publication. And for years, my reading was mostly 'looking backwards' to the 19th c.--The century in which this novel is set!

Si Morely is a vet and bored commercial artist when he is recruited into a top secret government experiment--traveling back in time. He is an excellent student and becomes the best at time travel. 

He sets out to solve the mystery of his girlfriend's grandfather's death and strange headstone, with a half burnt letter her only clue. 

The story becomes a mystery, and a romance, and a study of what civilization has given us and what it has taken away. 

Finney excels at description. Every costume, every horse drawn vehicle, every building, and every activity is recreated in such detail, it's like seeing a movie play in one's head. The streets filled with their cacophony of noise and smells, congested with pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. The city at play in the snow. A devastating fire and daring rescues. An escape from police. 

And, the book is filled with Si's drawings and photographs, illustrating what he has seen.

Enger said if he had a book club, this would be his first choice.

My husband and I so enjoyed listening to News of the World together that I borrowed the audiobook of The Dutch House by Ann Patchett from the library. I had heard so much praise about Tom Hanks' narration--and it was justified.

We absolutely loved Hanks interpretation of the text. He brought the story alive. When I read the novel I did not catch the humor as strongly as Hanks delivers it. I will listen to anything read by Hanks.

The characters love or hate the Dutch House. Ownership is coveted by a second wife who steals it from her step-kids and then kicks them out. They can never quite get over its loss; they spend hours remembering their childhood there. Their inability to move on curtails their growth and harms their relationships.

I recalled my own lost childhood home. I fantasized about growing up and buying it back. When it was torn down while I was still a teenager, I was broken-hearted. 

This is a story of family and brokenness and loving the wrong things and regret and forgiveness. In the end, our family becomes the people who we choose and who choose us to be family.

Read my review of the novel here.

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

I closed the book--or rather swiped to the last page on my iPad--and my first thought was, I want to read this again. Now.

Because  Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar took me on a crazy ride across genres and space and time and I want to do it all over again.

I read Tidhar's Central Station last year after my son raved about it. So I was expecting Science Fiction. But Unholy Land transcends genre, encompassing alternative history, noir mystery, and time-travel sci-fi, with social and political commentary (not so unusual in sci-fi, of course), so in the end, it transports the reader into an imagined alternative reality AND reflects on contemporary world politics. Add the "wink wink" self-referential nods and existential discussions on the nature of reality, we also get humor and philosophy.

In one work of fiction. And I think I missed some things.

So, yes, I want to read it AGAIN.

Tidhar was inspired by a true story of forgotten history. In 1904, the Zionist movement leader Theodor Herzl was offered land in Uganda as a Jewish homeland. Three men went on an expedition to survey the territory. One became separated and at journey's end, reported fertile land and while the other a saw desert. The idea was abandoned. Tidhar's novel considers the implications of establishing a Jewish homeland predating the Nazi regime.

The main character Lior Tirosh (note the character's name, so like Lavie Tidhar) slips through to an alternative reality. He doesn't realize what has happened, but he is tracked by two people who have been through the portal and lived in other worlds. He becomes embroiled in a battle to control the portal and prevent overlaps in realities.

Tirosh questions, what is history if not an attempt to impose order on a series of meaningless events, just as a detective must piece together a story from conflicting tales.

Don't expect escapist genre fiction, readers, for in Unholy Land we learn in all the worlds possible walls will be built and some will be cast into the outer darkness.

"Lavie Tidhar is a clever bastard, and this book is a box of little miracles." Warren Ellis, Afterword Unholy Land

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Here is what the publisher offers on the plot:

When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh* returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina—a Jewish state established in the early 20th century—is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch.

While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to believe he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state’s security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.

For if it is possible for more than one Palestina to exist, the barriers between worlds are beginning to break.

Unholy Land
by Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon Publications
Pub Date 06 Nov 2018
ISBN 9781616963040
PRICE $15.95 (USD)

A Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock

In the year 2077 Huck Finn reflects back on his life, beginning in 1835 when he and the escaped slave Jim began their raft journey down the Mississippi River. Somehow they became time travelers until Hurricane Katrina shipwrecked Huck back into passing time.

Along the way, they saw America caught in wars, the marvel of electric lighting, and how racism kept its grip on society.

Jim got off the raft in 1960, finding a lynch mob waiting for him. In 2005 Huck meets James, who tries to keep him from harm. As an adult, Huck falls in love with Jameson, who becomes his wife. She writes a novel, The Boy In His Winter. Like Jim, James and Jameson are African American.

What Huck realizes from his vantage point of 85 years is how badly he treated Jim, how he accepted his society's values unthinking, diminishing Jim as a person and as a friend.

"I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I'm not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used.(...)We'd wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we were close in on the river's end, which as not to be the journey's end, as I learned later." Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

At the end of his life, Huck returns to his hometown to play act Mark Twain, telling his own life stories. Huck calls his story a comedy, having seen enough for 'three or four lifetimes."

"Haven't you learned by now how fantastic a business it is to be alive?"-Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

The novel is episodic, meandering as the Mississippi River, but I was charmed by Huck's narrative, although there is nothing of innocence to be found. Huck is deformed by societal values, pursuing wealth and conspicuous consumption as an adult as thoughtlessly as he accepted slavery in his youth. With a broad overview of American history distilled into one lifetime, and grappling with memory and how the past is altered with our storytelling of it, Huck's tale shows the darkness behind what we remember as Twain's story of boyish freedom.

I received a book from the publisher as part of a LibraryThing giveaway.

The Boy in His Winter
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-934137-76-5