The Horn Book » Time travel

Getting in the loop

Roger Sutton — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:06:13 +0000

Thank God Richard sent me this code-crack for Looper. (Warning: story at link spoilers the whole movie in detail. How many times did that guy see it???) We saw it this weekend and, while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t always follow it. And, of course, it was no Tom’s Midnight Garden. But WHAT IS?

The post Getting in the loop appeared first on The Horn Book.

>Yes, another time-travel post

Roger Sutton — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:51:00 +0000

>Has anyone else seen Source Code yet? The ending reminded me of Tom’s Midnight Garden (that cool thing with the skates) although I don’t think it completely held together. Post any theories in the comments and don’t hold back on spoilers. Also feel free to speculate on the wonderful Vera Farmiga’s resemblance to Pam on The Office.

Speaking of Tom, when I was at TLA last week Betty Carter reported on the same phenomenon I’ve noticed: grad students today hate the book. Why is that?

The post >Yes, another time-travel post appeared first on The Horn Book.

>Have You Seen This Man?

Roger Sutton — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:36:00 +0000

Have You Seen This Man?" alt="timetraveler >Have You Seen This Man?" />

I love this picture. At the Hattieburg festival, Tom Barron told the story of how he finally met Madeleine L’Engle (which meeting was both forestalled and engendered through a cruel, cruel joke) and what an inspiration A Wrinkle in Time had been to him. When I was out running this afternoon, I came upon a stretch along Leverett Pond which was busy with people. I had already taken off my headphones to tell a couple that their standard poodle was so black and curly and perfectly still that I was within five feet of him before I knew whether I was looking at his face or the back of his head. So I was paying attention. And then I saw no one around me until I was passing a bench where, suddenly it seemed, a man was sitting reading the paper. I was startled and almost bumped into him. Was he a time traveler, was there a glitch in the Matrix? Or did his cloak of invisibility suddenly fail him? He was not wearing a yellow suit.

The post >Have You Seen This Man? appeared first on The Horn Book.

>I’ll Be Seeing You . . .

Roger Sutton — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:56:00 +0000

>Last Friday we had a very entertaining time of proofreading the Guide, aided by candy and fave tunes from the 80s provided by Miss Touch-Me Pod, whose little speaker recalls the halcyon days of AM transistor radios. There was an ongoing war, too, over the merits of The Time Traveler’s Wife, loved by Elissa and Chelsey and hooted at derisively by Kitty and me.

But I am glad that time travel seems to be back in a big way and I’ll gladly give Audrey Niffenegger the credit if she wants it. The children’s book of the summer is Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (see my interview with the author here), and I’ll be glad when you’ve all read it so we can talk about it. For those of you who have, and without giving anything away: do the kids and neighborhood remind anyone else of Vera Williams’s Scooter?

I also recently enjoyed–and Time Traveler’s Wife fans can here hoot at me–Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, a chick-lit novel by Laurie Viera Rigler about a young lady of Austen’s milieu whooshed into contemporary L.A. via a fall from a horse. The book is a sequel to Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, about the L.A. gal who trades places with the Regency one, but that conceit seemed rather more ordinary to me so I didn’t pick up the book. The two books together make me think of Nancy Bond’s sadly neglected Another Shore, about a contemporary girl time-travelled back to colonial times, aware that a girl from then and there has taken her place in the present–and probably has it much, much worse.

Why is it that when I hit my head, I only get a lump?

The post >I’ll Be Seeing You . . . appeared first on The Horn Book.

>What’s with all the flashbacks?

Roger Sutton — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:18:00 +0000

>I wish I could find this great example Florence King gave of a sentence filled with clauses and “had”s and “had had”s that indicated that an author “had failed to begin her story far enough back in time.” Flashbacks are ruining my prime-time experience. Lost, Heroes, Damages, even Without a Trace–it seems like they can’t go ten minutes without the words “seven years earlier” appearing as a title card on the screen. I think what bothers me the most is that it’s supposed to look like fancy sleight-of-hand po-mo storytelling when it only increases my suspicion that they are making it up as they go along, and going back to patch up inconvenient inconsistencies. Thank God for 24.

The post >What’s with all the flashbacks? appeared first on The Horn Book.

>Archeology

Roger Sutton — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:09:00 +0000

>We’re doing an office clean-up today and uncovered something that seems far too relic-like for its relatively unadvanced age: an unabridged cassette recording of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Narrated by Jill Tanner, it’s a superb rendition, but who knows from cassettes anymore?

The post >Archeology appeared first on The Horn Book.

>A message from the future

Roger Sutton — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:03:00 +0000

>Simon & Schuster offers new picture book biographies of Hillary Clinton (Hillary Rodham Clinton: Dreams Taking Flight by Kathleen Krull and Amy June-Bates), Barack Obama (Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, by Nikki Grimes and Bryan Collier), and John McCain (My Dad, John McCain by Meghan McCain and Dan Andreasen ). Of interest solely to their respective fans, the books are equally adulatory (Clinton by understatement, Obama by overstatement, McCain by, c’mon, he’s her dad), but only the last dares predict the future. To be published on September 2, My Dad, John McCain ends “in September 2008, the Republican Party had a big meeting, the Republican National Convention. And on that day, my dad was officially chosen as the Republican candidate for president of the United States.”

The post >A message from the future appeared first on The Horn Book.