Tag: Book suggestion

Another Good Read: This Time Tomorrow

If it seems like my blog has become a lot of book recommendations, I’m sorry. I’m doing more reading than I have ever done. I suppose my desire to read comes and goes, but every book I have read lately has had something in the plot summary that peaked my interest. It’s been fun to read stuff from new authors, too.

I literally just finished This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub. She is not a “new” author in that she has written many other books. I did find it interesting to know that her and her husband own their own book store in Brooklyn, New York.

If you have followed my blog for any length of time, I have mentioned my love for time travel stories. The thought of being able to go back in time and visit some famous event or to the future is intriguing. The Back to the Future movies, The Twilight Zone, Time Tunnel, and even the short lived series Timeless will always be fun to watch.

This book has a bit of time travel in it (and coincidentally, so does my next read). Here is the Goodreads synopsis:

“What if you could take a vacation to your past?

With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes, and a different kind of love story.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it’s her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?“

What I love about the premise of the story is that even though she wakes up on her 16th birthday, she is very aware that she just turned 40. This is an important part of the story. It is kind of the “If I knew then what I know now” sort of thing. Tiny Spoiler Alert: There is a “Groundhog Day” feel to the story as she repeats the same day more than once. Knowing that won’t spoil too much for you.

The love story eluded to in the synopsis is not the ordinary love story. It is the love between a daughter and her father. That love is really what drives the story.

It really wound up being a thought provoking story. I could easily see this being something that would be a good Book Club read or even something that would make a great movie.

Book Recommendation: How To Stop Time

Less than two weeks ago, I posted a blog about a book I read called The Midnight Library. I really enjoyed it. You can read that blog here:

Another Good Read – The Midnight Library

That was the first book I read by author Matt Haig, and it made me want to find other books by him that I might find just as good. So I went to the library website and found one. I’ve always been a big fan of time travel stuff, so the name of one book stuck out – “How to Stop Time.” While this isn’t a true time travel story in the sense of going back in time or forward in time, I found the premise interesting and ordered it.

Amazon and Good Reads both have this synopsis:

Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history–performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.

Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society’s watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can’t have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.

How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages—and for the ages—about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.

One review I read said, “How To Stop Time plays like a meditation on the tick and tock of time and mortality. On the preciousness of every moment and the nightmare of having both too few and too many.” I thought this really hit the nail on the head.

Is it a love story? To a degree, yes, but it is more than that. It was another Haig book that I couldn’t put down and finished in two days. There were some slow parts, but all in all, it was a good read. There is talk that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to make a film based on this book.

People always are talking about living forever, but is that really something you’d want to do? Following Tom’s story and the highs and lows of being alive for so long will make you really think about how you want to answer that question.