Review: Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Lately I seem to be saying, not my usual sort of book, a helluva lot. I think I'd just better get used to the confounding thought that, perhaps, my idea of what my usual sort of book is or was, has changed. I guess I am now, officially, an omnivorous reader. (I probably always was.)

Of course this could be due to a total lack of intellectual discrimination but I prefer to think of it as my annoying tendency

to want to know all kinds of esoteric stuff. Since my own days of adventuring seem to be over (and boy have I had a fun life), I guess I'm now searching for adventures of the brain. Adventures from an arm chair.

TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE by Jack McDevitt was one of many titles mentioned in At Home With A Book's Time Traveler's Challenge. Shortly thereafter, I noticed the book at the library and took it home. Kismet. I'm a fan of time travel writ well. My favorite writer who happens to incorporate time travel in her stories in a very smart way is the one and only, Connie Willis. There's little that can match her brilliance, but that won't stop me taking a look at other writers who take on time travel.

By the way: This will be my very FIRST Book Challenge, so we'll see how it all goes. If I mess it up (I admit, that's as likely to happen as not), then please remember I am NEW! Hopefully the pressure won't get to me - ha!

I'm not claiming to completely understand how and why time travel should work, I only know that in some strange way it all makes sense to me.

TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE is a fairly simple story : Shel and Dave Go Back in History, Meet Famous People and Have Excellent Adventures. But it is more like a tv show than any deeply, satisfying adventure film. Despite that, it was a lot of fun to read. When I was a kid, there was a terrific tv show called, You Are There, in which the camera purported to take the viewer back to a famous day in history so we could experience say, D-Day or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or the assassination of Julius Caesar - each week, a different historical incident. On each show, a 'newsman' would interview witnesses and participants in the events as if they were being filmed on the spot. It was great tv - wish they had something like that today, might teach kids (inadvertently or not) a bit about history. McDevitt's book definitely has a you are there touch to it.

It is the year 2019 and physicist Michael Shelborne has disappeared into the ether leaving his son, Adrian (known as Shel), an enigmatic message, two strange devices Shel's been ordered to destroy, and not much else. The police are suspicious but there's little they can do without a body. Shel, a physicist and lover of history, quickly figures out that his father has invented a very spiffy (my word) time travel device no bigger than a cell phone. Deducing his father is stranded somewhere in time, Shel enlists his friend, linguist David Dryden to help him go back and bring dad home.

But where to go? The search field is wide open and thousands of years old. Michael Shelborne could be anywhere in the past.

This is why the book is so much fun. Shel and Dave try to figure out where Shel's father has gone, allowing for Michael Shelborne's brilliance and historical interests. We get to watch two clever young men of today (it's only nine years in the future after all) using their wits, travelling in time, adjusting time, using time to their benefit, all the while attempting to keep from seriously affecting past events - nobody wants to confront the dreaded, deadly paradox.

Along the way we meet Galileo, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Cesare Borgia, a young Benjamin Franklin, writer Aldous Huxley, and a whole other cast of familiar and unfamiliar characters. If you have even a nodding knowledge of history you will be delighted by the ease with which Shel and Dave figure out ways to meet people who helped change it in some way.

In their quest, the two friends travel to Selma, Alabama on the eve of the 1965 march across the bridge which resulted in the infamous attack by the Selma police on peaceful civil rights marchers. They meet John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Andrew Young and a whole slew of incredibly brave people who had no clue they were about to be attacked in such a terrible way - a historic watershed event in America's quest for civil rights.

Shel and Dave travel to ancient Alexandria, to the magnificent library which housed thousands of books and plays in scroll form - the library which in later years would be completely burned to the ground, most of its irreplaceable books destroyed. To this day it is impossible to judge just how much wisdom and knowledge was lost to the ages. This is one of my favorite parts of the book as author McDevitt makes the whole idea of such an imposing setting very approachable. Shel and Dave even manage to save many heretofore unknown ancient Greek plays by the simple expedient of making copies and sending them on to the 21st century with not, perhaps, the best results since they can't reveal their true sources.

My only quibble with the book is the absence of any really deep characterization. The two main characters never touched me in any real way. From my point of view, their emotional lives remained flat and uninvolving. I also felt that the book would have benefited by being a few hundred pages longer. There was, certainly, much in the past that could have been explored in more depth.

Despite this, the storyline arch is expertly done - from a funeral in the very beginning to the unique deciphering of a 'crime' near the end, it adds up to a mostly satisfying adventure in time. Shel and Dave meet almost everyone who's anyone and generally have fun doing it and we have fun reading about it.

I enjoyed the adventure and can highly recommend TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE as a page-turning, fast read with a few vivid lessons in history thrown in for good measure.

Halloween Reading

Ok, I was going to wait until it was Officially October before I posted a bunch of titles that might make fine reading for the Halloween season (yes, I suppose it is now a season on its own) but over the weekend, I saw some front yards already decorated with humongous blow-up pumpkins, scarecrows, etc and thought: if I wait for October, Christmas will be upon us and I'll be a day late and a dollar short with my list. Long sentence, I know. I'm prone to that.

Anyway, so let's talk about mysteries, beasties, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. None of my recommendations are horror per se, because, well, I never read horror-HORROR. (Well, hardly ever, I do occasionally read Dean Koontz.) I do read thrillers and horrible stuff happens in them, but they're not qualified as horror, unless it's John Connolly and I never read him - too scary. (Although I admit he's a terrific writer.)

I thought I'd just make my list a bit different from others by not including titles you'd probably see everywhere. I hope I've made my list a fun melange of different sorts of books. Things I think are perfect for this time of year when ghosts, witches and goblins lurk on every corner.

There's only one vampire book, because, as a rule, I don't read vampire books. But Sunshine by Robin McKinley is the rare exception. I've read this twice and the second time held up as well as the first. I'm about to break the rule for a second time, though as I have The Passage by Justin Cronin sitting here waiting to be read. Can't recommend it though, 'cause I haven't read it yet. I also don't read Stephen King, so that explains the absence of his books.

I'm only going to post a couple of sentences about each book shown above, because otherwise this post will go on indefinitely and we can't have that. I like to talk books too much as it is.

HALLOWE'EN PARTY by Agatha Christie

(Well, with a title like this, how could you not read this for Halloween?) Eccentric mystery writer Ariadne Oliver calls upon Hercule Poirot to solve a nasty murder which took place at a party she attended.

PASSAGE by Connie Willis

Willis is one of the premier American sci-fi writers. I wish she were much better known. I think if she weren't writing in genre, she'd be world famous, that's how good she is, plus it's what she deserves. Passage takes place at a gloomy hospital where a group of doctors/students are studying the near-death experience a little too closely. No, it's not what you immediately think.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by Agatha Christie

The classic mystery in a classic setting. Guests are stranded on an island estate after being invited for the weekend by an unknown host.

SUNSHINE by Robin McKinley

As I mentioned, this is the only vampire novel I've ever liked and finished reading. I wish this one had been made into a movie. It is quirky, funny, erotic and scary. Quite an accomplishment.
THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier

This beguiling, sad and intriguing story takes place in two realities. In one, it is a few years into the future and a great plague has wiped out most of mankind. In the other, we're in a city in which the dead exist as long as they are remembered by those still left alive. A brilliantly conceived book.

THE ALIENIST by Caleb Carr

One of the first historical suspense novels (it takes place in early 20th century New York), to dwell on the new science of crime psychology - the first book in which a serial killer comes to be recognized as such. Ghoulish, but so well written you put up with it.

SPEAKS THE NIGHTBIRD by Robert McCammon

An epic suspense novel, so big it was published in two books. The Carolinas, 1699. A beautiful widow is accused of being a witch and bringing disaster to the town of Fount Royal. The pages fly by in this so you're never really aware you're reading this mammoth undertaking.

ODD THOMAS by Dean Koontz

In my view, this is Koontz's masterpiece. Yes he is a horror writer, but I admit to reading some of his books and this is one that I, thankfully, did not pass up. Brilliant doesn't quite cover Koontz's extraordinary achievement. Odd Thomas is a quiet, self-effacing, self-aware, short-order cook who, oh by the way, can see the dead - it is a Koontz book, after all. Of course, there's bloody stuff happening, but the character of Odd Thomas makes it all worthwhile.

THE MEPHISTO CLUB by Tess Gerritsen

This was my introduction to Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series. (Rizzoli is a Boston medical examiner and Isles, a cop.)It is a violent read and not something I would have ordinarily picked up, but somehow it kept me turning the pages while giving me the creeps. Though the book takes place over the Christmas holidays, it is anything BUT a happy holidays book. Not for the faint of heart.

LIVES OF THE MONSTER DOGS by Kristen Bakis

An eerie, grotesque story of dogs genetically engineered by a 19th century German scientist - the monster dogs in the title - to walk upright and speak with the help of voice boxes. They arrive in NYC, with prosthetic human hands, dressed in Victorian clothing and seeking, as Frankenstein's monster did, their place in the world. The book is hard to find as it is out of print, but in my view, it is well worth looking for in the secondary market.

THE HEARSE YOU CAME IN ON by Tim Cockey

On a much lighter note, this is the first book in the Hitchcock Sewell series, written a few years ago, set in Baltimore. Hitch is an undertaker who solves murders. Yeah, makes no sense, but it's a great deal of fun. Tim Cockey is a terrific writer who should be much better known.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle's classic. Sherlock Holmes and Watson must solve a creepy murder on the moors. Are the Baskervilles doomed to death by violence? "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Special FBI Agent Pendergast (eccentric with a Capital E) is on the job again, searching for a nasty, inventive serial killer in NYC. This is another ghoulish read from Preston and Child, but it is also fast moving, creepy fun, in between the dead bodies. There are several books in this series and you can really jump in anywhere. I picked this one because it was my first one.

THE TAKING by Dean Koontz

I read this when I first discovered Koontz and was not disappointed. It's one of his more frightening end of the world as we know it, books. I could not put it down.

MISTRESS OF MELLYN by Victoria Holt

A terrifically moody gothic if you're in a gothic/suspense/love story mood. Has a high creep quotient too, that's why I've included it. Try to find one with the wonderful original cover if you're buying.

A DIRTY JOB by Christopher Moore

After a startlingly sad beginning, this book settles into the kind of thing that Moore is famous for, with his usual cast of characters: ghouls, beasties, humans with second sight - the usual. I LOVE this book. Can't recommend it enough. Moore can be an acquired taste, but if I were you I'd acquire it immediately.

I will wait until October to post my nice list of scary movies for those of you who like the sort of scary I like. (NO exploding stomachs, NO flinging of brains, that sort of thing.) I'm already stocking up on popcorn.

I have read all the book recommendations on this list, so I'm knowing whereof I am speaking when I say these are good reads for times when it gets dark early, leaves are falling, the wind is blowing and a chill has begun to creep into your bones making the whole thing official: winter is coming, the geese are getting fat.