Time and Again

Time and Again
by Jack Finney

This is a fascinating time travel novel, by a master fantasist. Artist Si Morley gets involved in a secret government project to prove that someone can be sent backwards in time and then return to the present day. The "science" is hokey -- using hypnosis and the environmental equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber -- and the novel only remotely deals with potential time travel paradoxes. However, this book is a love poem to Victoriana -- Finney's extremely detailed descriptions of everything the characters encounter in the novel give a real sense of place, and the reader can easily find themselves falling in love with 1880s New York. This novel, in many ways, inspired the Jane Seymour/Christopher Reeve time-travel romance film, Somewhere in Time (even though that was written by Richard Matheson). If you liked that film, you'll probably enjoy this novel, too. -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

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New Booktalk Booklist: The History of the Victorian Age...

"The History of the Victorian Age Will Never be Written: We Know Too Much About It" -- Strachey
Bethany Branch, January 16, 2009 and Gere Branch, February 2, 2009
Marcy G.
Obviously, Lytton Stachey [1880-1932] was wrong! Much has been written about the Victorian Age, both fiction and non-fiction. Here are just a few:

• 
  FICTION
  And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• A Flaw in the Blood by Stephanie Barron
• The Alienist by Caleb Carr
• The Chili Queen y Sandra Dallas
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
• The World From Rough Stones by Malcolm MacDonald
• The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry
• A Christmas Journey by Anne Perry
• Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent post-Civil War Period by Marge Piercy
• Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn
• Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas
• 
  NON-FICTION
  Portrait of a Killer: Jack th Ripper by Patricia Cornwell [364.152 Cor]
• Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold Packer [942.081 Pac]
• Life in Victorian England by W.J. Reader [914.2 R221]
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Stephen Johnson [616.932 Joh]
• Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered its Deadly Secrets by John R. Pierce and Jim Writer [616.918 Pie]
• The Victorians by A.N. Wilson [942.081 Wil]
• Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife: What She Did All Day by Yaffa Draznin [E-book]
• The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton *

* -- Not owned by Lincoln City Libraries; ask about borrowing it through Interlibrary Loan!

For further Victorian Era mysteries, see our Murder By Gaslight booklist
For further Jack the Ripper materials, see our The Ripper booklist