>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?