Pick it Back Up

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger this morning (I'm off work today). Here are my impressions of it.

It's hard to get into at first. It's hard to understand how someone can exist outside of time. It's hard to understand how someone can split off from himself and be at two places at once--or at the same places as two different versions of himself. Read the first 1/4 of the book and pay attention to the dates and ages of the characters. It's OK if you can't completely wrap your mind around it. You'll get it later.

At about the 1/2 way point of the book, you'll start to grasp more of it.

The last 150 pages or so are action packed. They're emotional. They're intense. They'll probably make you cry.

It's worth picking back up, Mary. :)

I don't want to go crazy talking about the things I liked about it because I don't want to spoil anything, but it does raise some interesting ideas:

1. If you had the ability to jump one day into the future to get the winning lottery numbers, and then jump back into the present to buy the lottery ticket, would you?

2. Imagine that you know the future of what's going to happen in your family--how you'll die, whether or not your spouse's multiple miscarriages would eventually yield a living child or whether you should give up, how your spouse would react to life after you're gone, etc...but the catch is that you can't change anything. Do you tell the other person what you've learned, or is it best to let her find out when the time comes?

Very interesting and CRAZY book. I can't say that I understand everything that happened, but in the end, I didn't have to in order to enjoy it.

Anybody else read it? What did you think?

The spoily parts are in white below. Highlight them to read them if you've already read the book.

Did Alba not just break your heart? First of all, I thought the way she was conceived was brilliant. I was wondering how the author was going to pull that off. But to find out that she time travels too and that after Henry's gone, she can meet with him and get to know him through time travel. The way she would cling to him when he visited just broke my heart.

And Clare. Clare who spent her whole life waiting on Henry--waiting to meet him in the present, waiting for him to come back from all of his journeys, and waiting for the one meeting she was promised as an old lady. That got to me too. This was a great love story.