GAG!!!

When I Googled Faulkner, a title called Barn Burning poped up and I truly read it as ‘book burning’ — I thought some other readers must have decided to burn his books — but no — it was just my crazy head still reeling from Sound & Fury.

I also quite like what J.K. Rowling did with the camping sequence in the middle of HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. It felt like they were in the woods forever, and you were just waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen again. It was tiring to read. But that’s why it was brilliant: Harry and Hermione and Ron were out there for months, bored and tense most of the time as they hid and tried to think of leads for the hallows. By dragging that portion of the story out, we felt their exhaustion.

I’m not a fan of the Twilight novels, but I did like what Meyer did with the blank pages with the month’s names in the second book (I think?). Again, it allowed the reader to experience time the same way as the character.

And I just recommended it in another post, but Kim Stanley Robinson is brilliant in THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT. That story is an alternate history where the black plague wipes out most of Europe, so they never dominate the globe and other cultures shape the development of technology, the discovery of the New World, etc. It covers about 1000 years, following a group of characters who keep reincarnating together in different times and places and cultures. It’s quite a fascinating read and an interesting approach to a story stretched out over so many centuries.

I recommended SPIN in that post, too, but I’ll say it’s the last ten percent of the third book in that trilogy, VORTEX, that was masterful in its handling of time (and also very moving). Not only do we get a sense of the aliens’ perception of time (they’re nanobots, so they see things on a grand scale; their plans move so slowly from our perception, but it’s because they’re working with a vision spread over billions of years), but we see the slow death of the universe through the perspective of a sort of alien/human hybrid.