Time Travel: A History | 
pickIn the century or so since H. G. Wells's novel, philosophers, physicists, and SF writers have reflected on time and time travel and have reacted to each others' ideas. This book looks at all three groups' contribution to the cultural conversation in that period.
Some of the philosophy and physics was a bit over my head but a new section of my wishlist/TBR has opened up.
"The rules of time travel have been written not by scientists, but by storytellers."
#TBRtemptation post 2! An exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in science and literature, and it's relation to our understanding of time itself. Gleick begins with H. G. Wells and goes from there: electricity, steam trains, finding buried cities, clocks, Proust, Dr. Who, paradoxes, pulp fiction, cosmology, and our instant, push-button wired world. #blameLitsy #blameMrBook 😎
Has anyone heard about these books? I bought them for my kindle yesterday, each $0.99 although you can read them online for free. They were written in the late 1800's with a lot of creepy ties to today's politics, Trump, Russia. The conspiracists are having a field day and I'm so intrigued. BTW, I think they're kids books or at least the Baron Trump one is.
I'm not sure if this is #compasspoints what others would have in mind but I am absolutely fascinated about time travel and the very idea of it.... the time travellers wife is one of my absolute faves 💕#jubilantjuly
"I don't want to talk about time travel shit, because we'll start talking about it and then we'll be here all day talking about it and making diagrams with straws."
P.s. Who else is loving the new MST3K??!!
pickThis was a view of time and how it has been viewed in the western world. Specifically in literature, tv, movies, and philosophy. It was interesting and well written. But I found myself a little tired of hearing books described within this book.
I stayed up way too late finishing A Court of Thorns and Roses last night and spent my commute to my first day back to work listening to this. More philosophy and physics than I expected...
Ready to get into this newest James Gleick. It definitely has a promising start.
Clockwise from top left:
1. A fascinating history of time travel in science and literature
2. duh, a classic. Definitely a contender for my most often read book
3.People from all ages get pulled out of their time to try to build Plato's Republic. It doesn't go as well as they'd like
4.I'm reading this right now. A man from a utopian future travels back in time and accidentally causes our decidedly non-utopian present. Delightful
#funfridayphoto
Do you guys have that thing where you're packing, and you're nervous about where you're going because no one there reads, and so even though it's only for 2-3 days, you pack enough books to build a fort just in case? (Pictured is bag 1 of 2-- the new James Gleick is in there somewhere). 😥
pickThis audiobook made me remember a dream where I was a substitute teacher asked to teach 11-year-olds about the nature of time. At the last minute, I had to revise my lesson because they added kindergarteners to the group. Gleick would have been up to the challenge. His writing is so accessible, while quoting physicists, philosophers and fiction writers. Just scroll through my timeline to find ten quoted examples. I held myself back!
Even when we suffer from jet lag, the quintessential disease of time travel, we are shrewd in our suffering & can nod wisely at William Gibson's account of soul delay: "Her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly & are left behind & must be awaited like lost luggage."
"The literature of time travel, though Bob Heinlein in 1941 would not have dreamed of calling his work literature, begins to offer a way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them viscerally and naively."
[Screen grab above is from Wikipedia. Anson McDonald is one of Heinlein's pseudonyms.]
As for books, they play with time, as music does. They thrive on anticipation. They flirt with expectation. Even if you know a book well, even if you can recite it entire like the Homeric poet, you cannot experience it as a timeless object.
Ursula K Le Guin: "Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time."
Stephen Hawking: "We are all travelling through time, one second at a time."
"By the weekend, there will have been a sea battle."
Not every language has a future perfect progressive tense built in. When your language does, it tends to feel natural.
Charles Lamb, 1817: "Your then is not my then, but my now may be your then. Whose head is competent to these things?"
Gleick: Nowadays we are all competent to these things. We have time zones. We can contemplate the international date line.
Einstein: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Up next: nonfiction audiobook about time travel seems just right after listening to a novel featuring time travel. "Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen."
pickDistinct from the rigorous chronicling of his previous book, The Information, Time Travel: A History is Gleick's guide to the ideas and discussions attendant with the titular subject, and an enjoyably accessible one at that.
#booktober #WishICouldbeThere @RealLifeReading
Wouldn't it be wild if we really could time travel?!
My husband picked up this book yesterday in Northampton- can't wait to have him finish so I can read it. 📚🎇
pickInteresting topic and some surprise Arcadia references sprinkled throughout. I always love an Arcadia reference.
Books and a pot of carrot cupcake tea and a comfy blanket. What a great way to spend an evening.
Continuing my streak of awesome with 2016 and time travel
"Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you." - Susan Sontag
I'll read anything by this guy, and TIME TRAVEL is next.
New audio book. I'll see you in a few years, yesterday. #timetravel
