The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
548 pages
Published 2003
Read from January 25 to April 8
Rating: 4 out of 5
Three calendar months without finishing a single book. Even in my personal reading dark ages, from approximately 2009 through 2011, I'm not sure I ever went three entire months without reading something. I was pretty depressed in the first half of January, still despondent over the election of Cheeto Mussolini, and I fell into a habit of turning off my brain and browsing Facebook and the internet at large, rather than escaping into books.
Books are hard things, hurtful things, words of pain and love and loss tattooed on felled trees and shared, mind to mind, in the private corners of imagination. Really good books will wring you out and leave you bewildered, carrying memories of a life you never lived. But reading a bunch of books, finishing two or three a week for years (as fun and rewarding as that is), can rob reading of some of its strange power. Taking so many weeks to finish The Time Traveler's Wife gave it a larger role in my life than most books have attained in recent years; living with it, having it as a companion for a period of sweeping personal change, elevated it in a way that reading a couple books each week doesn't often permit. Not that I wish to return to the dark days of my de-literacy -- it was merely a passing observation.
Having lived with Wife for so long, it's hard for me to gather my thoughts on it in any coherent or tidy fashion. It was an experience as much as it was a book, an experience that may not owe entirely to how long it took me to finish it. I won't say it was a perfect book by any means, but it was intensely felt and movingly constructed work, utilizing time travel as a literary device far more effectively than any other novel I can presently recall. This book made me feel things, and I can think of few higher compliments.
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