Come with us now on a journey through time and space
Three books featuring time travel in ways that aren’t awful.
I have a friend and she knows who she is (she’s Kelly) who avoids anything related to time travel because it never makes sense. Also her rule must not be very ironclad because I’m pretty sure she’s seen Back to the Future. And I also know that I’ve made her read the Emma Straub book on this list. Kelly, you’re a real pushover.
Anyway, I think I have adopted her peeve because now I am also like, ugh, time travel sometimes. Too many paradoxes! How does any of it work! Must I just accept these gaping plot holes and move on with my life as if everything is just normal! OK, usually I do, but sometimes it grates. These books (along with Outlander, see EELS: Giant paperbacks with maps at the front) really did not!
I present them to you in the order of poignant → gripping. If you want a page turner, skip to the end. If you want to think and feel, stay at the top. If you want to feel that you yourself have time traveled back to 1996, the best possible year, go straight to the middle. Ya welcome!
Guess what! There’s an archive spreadsheet to see all my recommendations from this year in one handy spot! If you’re a subscriber, you can have it!
🕰️ Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot (translator), 2015
I am so into Japanese novels lately. I was reading somewhere about how difficult it is to translate Japanese into English and keep the original tone, and I am fascinated by this. Send me more good Japanese literary fiction recs! (See EELS: Let’s unsettle this once and for all)
This book is very sweet, though it does have a lot of twists. It’s like sweetly twisty. Not dark, but not full of light either. It feels like life—it’s full of ordinary people coming to terms with ordinary things happening to them, and wanting some second chances, even though the rules clearly tell them that they can’t really have those second chances. Their time travel experience is limited to something more like closure. It’s well done, and I thought I knew where a lot of it was going, but I didn’t.
Also, I think I would have been way less into this book if it weren’t for the fact that there is just a ghost hanging out all the time reading a book? Why is no one upset by this?
Recommended for: Those who are looking for something a little different, but something pretty easy to read. You will think and feel things. And then you will move on.
💿 This Time Tomorrow
Emma Straub, 2022
I can’t figure out how to tell you about this without spoiling anything. So I’m going to give you some keywords.
The 90s!
Pomander Walk in NYC!
A cat!
Dads!
The porch sofa in which I read this book in almost entirely one sitting!
Recommended for: Those who miss flipping through CD wallets and wearing messy makeup and just being awesome. Honestly, I have not always been a fan of Emma Straub which I know is sacrilege, but I was desperately on board with this one. It is a very good tale of happiness and grief and lots of things, but also is a page-turner. Clearly, as I was pinned to an outdoor sofa among probably some bugs.
🦷 Version Control
Dexter Palmer, 2016
This is the single book that has actually explained to me how time travel could work in a way that made possible sense. Kelly, are you listening? The plot was kind of airtight!
I read this in a frenzy of very good books that were kind of in this modern sci-fi realm, and I handle those a lot better than spaceships. Think of this as a very gripping, “But if we could time travel, should we?” book. I’ll leave you to guess what the answer is.
If dark books about the perils of future tech in the hands of fallible—way too fallible humans—are your jam… oh, and you would like those books to be very well written, this one is for you.
Recommended for: Those who like Black Mirror.
And now, a bonus recommendation!
🏴 MacBeth — William Shakespeare, 1606
“Guys, MacBeth might actually be decent.”
Recommended by: JR, who is 15, and texted this to his parents, who are my friends. At first we all were like “haha” as one does, but if you think about it… that’s a pretty amazing thing for a 400-and-some-year-old play to still be hanging about, be read or whatever he has done by a cool teen (do they say cool anymore who knows) and be called “maybe decent”??? Like, if I wrote something right this second and it was time traveled forward 400 years, there is simply no way any cool-who-knows teenager would pick it up and look at it and think anything other than “this is indecipherable garbage” or however the would say it in those times! So I feel that this endorsement is like a banged gong of praise! Good work, William Shakespeare.
If you’ve got a recommendation, by all means, give it to me! You can do so by hitting reply to this email, shouting your truth, and we’ll get it going.
That was the thirty-eighth EELS! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan
I do love that Scottish play! Wild that the toddler who used to wander around the church nursery asking "DIS?" repeatedly is now recommending the Bard. 😭
And I haven't read any of these others yet, but I also love to go back to the 90s. So let me recommend something fluffy: the 6th season of The Vampire Diaries, where some characters get stuck in a "prison world" that turns out to just be...1994. 😂