March 2022 theme: We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone

says Hastings in King Henry IV, Part 2, Act 1, Scene 3



When we are young, one year is like eternity; as we get older, time flies ever more swiftly. March is an opportunity to explore this baffling phenomenon, and you are invited to approach it in every way you want, fiction or non-fiction.
Read about the making of calendars or clocks, time travel, turning points in history that marked the beginning or the end of an age, observe the passing of the seasons in a farming year, the doings of a family across the generations, or simply pick a book with a time word in the title.
Some ideas:
What is time? by J.G. Whitrow
A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking
Cartographies of time by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
Longitude by Dava Sobel, a perennial favourite about how chronometers made exact navigation possible
Cox: or the course of time by Christoph Ransmayr
Momo by Michael Ende
A wrinkle in time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Time Machine by H.G.Wells
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

And please remember the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php?title=Reading_Through_Time_Challenge&amp...

I found the sundial on a house in Brittany and like the attitude: If they bite you, bite back.

What a great theme! You've mentioned several I've always meant to read; maybe now is the time!

I think I'm going to go with Time Travel: A History by James Gleick, also the author of (among other books) Chaos: Making a New Science and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

I've also got The Bone Clocks around the house and might do that as a fiction read.

Excellent theme. I am planning on reading The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author certainly scrambled the concept of time by having his main character age in reverse!

I will re-read The Time Machine

This year, I've been using various books to participate in challenges (as opposed to years past when I've used challenges to inform my reading); but this particular prompt led me to buy a book just for March: About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (by David Rooney). Without the endnotes and illustrations, it's only a couple of hundred pages long and; from the table of contents covers time periods from 263 BCE to 1972, with something about Korean Air Flight 007 (1982) in the Introduction and a plutonium timekeeper at the end. I'm particularly interested in the two chapters that cover the 19th century; but looking forward to it all!

This past December, I read a book that would have fit this prompt nicely: When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains (by Ariana Neumann). The author's father was a Czechoslovakian Jew when Reinhard Heydrich became the Acting Protector of Bohemia & Moravia for the Reich. Watches play a critical role in the book's theme and among the many personal photographs, there are some of Mr. Neumann's timepieces.

>4 DeltaQueen50: a much better story of the same concept IMO The Confessions of Max Tivoli

among my favorites

Time Travelers Wife
This is how you lose the time war
hitchikers guide to the galaxy mmm, it perhaps is time for me to reread this again
life after life
the first 15 lives of Harry August!!!!!
time ships a sequel of sorts to time machine
theif of time
time and again
to say nothing of the dog
the door into summer!!!!!

couple of short stories

sound of thunder
the ugly little boy

>7 cindydavid4: I hven't heard of The Confessions of Max Tivoli so I will have to check into it!

Be interested in what you think.

Natalie Hodges, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, if anyone's interested, is available on the February Early Reviewers list. (If you win, you might not get it before the end of March, though; and if you do, it will probably be a bit toward the end of the month.)

I found one that I have in the stacks. In Five Years was on one of the longer time travel lists.

For the current February theme as well as the first quarter period read, I'm reading Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, which could also be used for this March theme because the book is broken into "parts" labeled to correspond to the seasons. In fact, I'm reading it in the Folio Society edition, which includes an introduction by Angela Thirlwell, who takes explicit note of the novel's theme of seasonal rotation.

Some very interesting choices! Taking notes...

I have so many books to read for LT threads and challenges, Im gonna make it easy and reread the restaurant at the end of the universe (from the Hitchiker Guide to the Galaxy trilogy). And remember boys and girls, the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.

Possibilities from my shelf:

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Time by Eva Hoffman
Back to Reality by Mark Stay
The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom.

Any recs?

>17 Tess_W: Alas, the only one from your list that I’ve read is A Wrinkle in Time a few years ago and it just wasn’t for me. IIRC, there was a touch of religion in there that put me off.

>17 Tess_W: I read A Wrinkle in Time this afternoon and I wouldn't recommend it even though it's a Newbery book.

I think I'll need to take a bit longer to think about this one.

Ok, didn't take long after all. Looked a little closer and found plenty of options:

The Mountain: My Time on Everest / Ed Viesturs
Beyond the Burning Time / Kathryn Lasky
A Time for Mercy / John Grisham
A Stitch in Time / Kelley Armstrong

There were more options with just the word "time". I didn't even take time to look for "minute", "hour", or anything else.

Ooh! I just realized that one of two Dickens novels that I want to get to in March is Hard Times! It will also tie in with the theme of industrial impact on English societal structures (cf Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy) and fit into the quarterly theme. :-)

I’ll be reading The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. She ends the first paragraph of her first chapter, which describes the funeral of Edward VII: “The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortège left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.” I love her writing…I’ve read this one, but so long ago that I don’t remember much of it. It’s nice to pull one off my shelf, for a change.

I love all of Tuchmans books, that one was the first I read and very eye opening as to the history. Need to back and reread it eventually.

MmmmBest Books with a Month in the Title

I've started listening to Hard Times (by Charles Dickens; narrated by Anton Lesser) - a satirical anti-industrialism work and the shortest Dickens novel in his oeuvre. One of the first characters we meet is Josiah Bounderby, a man who boasts of his origins in poverty. At this point, all I could think of was the absurdist sketch, "The Four Yorkshiremen" from "At Last the 1948 Show"! And from there, imagining all the characters in the novel as Monty Python comics. So. A half-hour reading and three hours going down the rabbit hole of Monty Python videos. #Sorry#NotSorry 😃

https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc

ETA: 02/28/2022: Well, I finished it! The only additional comment I have to make is that all of the characters, from the ridiculous Mr. Bounderby to the Queen of Passive-Aggressiveness, Mrs. Sparsit were vividly and evocatively drawn. A lot was packed in this short novel!

I have completed my read of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I enjoyed this bittersweet fantasy that encourages it's readers to think about time and ageism.

>23 dianelouise100: I have The Guns of August on my shelves but I haven't cracked the covers to see the writing. Looks like one I will enjoy.

I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle A children's sci-book from the 1970's. The story of Meg, a moody, "misunderstood" genius, and her siblings, who travel throughout the galaxy in search of her missing father, a physicist, who is being held prisoner on another planet. The children travel through multiple dimensions by tesseracts, or wrinkles in time. I guess it's good, if you like that sort of thing. I don't. Maybe the beauty of it is reading it as a child. Maybe not! 277 pages

I just finished Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd 3***, which (like Under the Greenwood Tree) has motifs of time running through it, most obviously in the progression of the seasons in rural sheep farming. Also, Gabriel Oak's ties to the natural world are emphasized by his broken watch and his ability to tell time through the position of the stars. Also fits in with the quarterly time period.

I just finished Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit in which four English clockmakers travel to China in the 18th century to build unique clocks for the Emperor. Inspired by a real person (James Cox and his automatons), it is more a reflection on the nature and experience of time. Just a little strange, but beautifully written.

Since my first book that I read for this theme was really just a novella, I have also read Village School by Miss Read. This is the first book in her series about Fairacre Village and she describes the passing of a year through the eyes of the school teacher. Descriptions of annual events are included as well as the passing of the seasons through descriptions of weather, flora and fauna.

Reading the restaurant at the end of the universe and will probably finish the rest of the trilogy as well, One of those books Ive read a hundred times, but fits the theme and seems to be the best I can come up with to read after my surgery, as I cant focus on anything else and I keep falling asleep. At least this one I can recite by heart!

A Stitch in Time / Kelley Armstrong
4 stars

Bronwyn, a widow at 38-years old and a history professor in Toronto, has inherited an old large home in rural England(?). This is a home that she hasn’t visited in 23 years. When she used to visit as a child, she met a boy her own age… turns out this boy was from about 200 years earlier! She saw him when they were children, and again when they were 15, but that summer, tragedy struck and Bronwyn stayed away for all those years later. When she returns this time, she finds not only is she still able to slip back in time, but the house is full of ghosts.

I really liked this. There was more romance than I normally read, but there was enough ghosts, mystery, and time travel to make up for that. Some of the ghost happenings were creepy (which, for me, is a good thing!). I did, however, feel badly for the poor neglected kitten, Enigma. Kitty was supposedly too young to be away from mom, but since Bronwyn wasn’t around for hours and hours at at time, I worried that Enigma would die without milk (knowing that was unlikely to happen in the book, but very unrealistic to say kitty was too young to be separated from mom, then neglect her like that without dire consequences; unweaned kitten, I believe, should be bottle-fed milk every 2 hours; maybe kitty was a bit older than that?) Obviously, that did not bring my rating down any. The mystery was good and I loved the creepy hauntings!

Just a note that I have to go out of town for awhile as my Mother is not doing well. I will have limited access to a computer but will try to check in to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

>35 DeltaQueen50: I hope all will be well with your mother and with you.

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing is a memoir by Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. The title refers to a saying of her father that helped the family get through hard times. In the first chapter, the author states, “Time is a place and every place has a time, for each one of us.” She tells how the lives of her grandfather and parents influenced her writing novels about the two world wars, about living in the country, growing up with her parents and younger brother, working hard and living in hardship, and about her large and loving extended family. Although we were born in different countries and I am about six years older than the author, born and raised in the suburbs, there were some similarities to our lives I so easily identify with. Thoroughly satisfying. A 5-plus star read for me.

Continuing with my Thomas Hardy project, The Return of the Native in the Norton Critical Edition (1st ed 1969) 3***.

Contemporary critics disliked Hardy's extravagant Native prose. I agree and would characterize it as "purple" prose. In giving this a 3*** rating, though, I'm also considering the quality of this particular Norton edition, which is a first edition published just about forty years after Hardy's death. The supplementary materials are badly dated (though the D.H. Lawrence articles are excellent and timeless, and a couple others are quite interesting). There's a 2d edition (2005) which is no doubt a better one on the supplementary materials.

Overall, I might give Native itself 3½***, but no more. A bit overrated, I think, within the Hardy canon.

ETA: Oops, the reason for my including this one in the monthly theme. Like a lot of Hardy novels, it seems, time runs through the theme. Here, the main plot (excluding the epilogue) run from Nov 5 Guy Fawkes Day for one year through Nov 6 the day following Guy Fawkes Day of the next year. One of the Norton Critical articles likens Native to a classic drama with its unities of time and place, and Eustacia at one point alternates between a watch and an hourglass.

I lost interest in The Guns of August in the middle section which recounts the battles of the first month of WWI in excruciating detail, so I put it aside (it would have been a reread.) Instead I read (and am glad to have finished in time) Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres for this thread. This novel is one of my very best reads of the year. It is set in the early decades of the 20th century in Turkey, during its chaotic and violent transition from the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey. The effects of war, religious fanaticism, and strident nationalism on the populace of one small town and its close neighbors are beautifully rendered. A 5* book for me!

>39 dianelouise100: that is on my top reads ever. Took me a few times to get into it but once I did oh my. So well written and so heartbreaking. Had no idea about the forced migration of greeks and turks to places strange to them, not knowing the language. And I think this is the first time i learned about smyna.

Not so serious, the first thing that clicks in my mind about the book is the turtle candle seduction scene!

>40 cindydavid4: The walking candles will be a memorable image for me too! This book was filled with so much of sheer beauty and quirky humor, all in the midst of such devastation. I know that after it settles in my brain for a few months I will want to read it again.

after i had a good cry, I turned right around and reread it!

It was hard to find a book on my own shelves that fit the time theme this month. I settled on The Victorian and the Romantic: a memoir, a love story, and a friendship across time. The title fit. So did the narrative. The author drew parallels between the events in her own life and those of the subject of her theses, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and found greater understanding of the novelist through her own experiences.