Replay

Jeff Winston is 43 when he suffers a fatal heart attack while on the phone with his wife. He wakes up in his college dorm, a freshman at Emory again, in an 18 year old body, with all of the knowledge of the last 25 years intact. So begins a series of "replays" in which he lives his life in any way he chooses, usually getting rich off of sports betting and the stock market due to his knowledge of the future. Each life ends in the same heart attack, no matter what steps he takes to prevent it. Jeff experiments with all kinds of lifestyles, from the ultra straight laced to complete hedonism. His "replays" grow progressively less meaningful until he meets a woman in the same predicament and they try to discover the meaning behind what is happening to them. I was a bit horrified at his blowing off class upon his return to college and found it interesting he never seemed interested in friendships, only romantic relationships. A fast read with some interesting thoughts on what gives life meaning.

A Wrinkle in Time

I have been entering my kids books into blogger and I came across this book, I favorite of mine in the junior high era. Meg Murray and her little brother Charles Wallace don't fit in very well. They appear to the town as either idiots or genius and everyone thinks they are strange. Plus their father is mysteriously missing. One dark and stormy night they travel through time via tesseract (the wrinkle in time) as well as space to rescue their father from where he is being held. A popular boy from Meg's grade -Calvin O'Keefe joins them and find he fits in better with Meg's family than his own. The story it great, exciting and fun, but as a kid, Nerdy Meg finding a a person who likes her and feeling useful on the hunt for her father were the highlights of the book for me. This book is a Newberry award winner.

Kindred

Kindred is Octavia Butler's time travel classic. I first heard about it in an interview with the author on NPR about ten years ago. Dana is an African American woman living in America in the 1970s who is married to a white man and has just moved into a new house, when she begins to time travel back and forth to the antebellum south. She realizes that each time she being called there to save the life of Rufus, a white boy who she comes to find out is her ancestor. Her husband begins to time travel with her and each trip into the past is progressively more dangerous. The book has a lot to say about race, gender and power, and has become a bit of a period piece itself (Dana is referred to as Black, rather than African American, for example). Interesting and worthwhile.