Monday, March 30, 2020

Five top books about time

Samantha Harvey is the author of four novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease. She lives in Bath, UK, and is a Reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University.

At the Guardian, Harvey shared her favorite "books that play with present, past and future," including:
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I read it around the same time I read Kant, and it seemed to me a lucid, bright playing out of that subjectivity of time he describes – the way it sticks here and slips there, the way the present is saturated in past and future, the way it contracts and expands. The two protagonists’ experience of a single day is an experience of moments that seem to occupy centuries, and decades that collapse with a single thought. All the while, Big Ben strikes the hour, a metronome that holds all this flux in balance.
Read about another entry on the list.

Mrs. Dalloway also appears on Charlotte Mendelson's list of the best books to help with coming out, Alex Clark's list of the best books set over twenty-hours, Mary Gordon's ten favorite books list, Andrew O'Hagan's six favorite books list, Elizabeth Strout's six favorite books list, Juan Gabriel Vásquez's six favorite books list, Becky Ferreira's list of seven of the best fictional depictions of female friendship, Rebecca Jane Stokes's list of seven favorite fictional shopaholics, Suzette Field's top 10 list of literary party hosts, Jennie Rooney's top ten list of women travelers in fiction, John Mullan's list of ten of the best prime ministers in fiction, and among Michael Cunningham's 5 most important books, Dani Shapiro's ten favorite books, and Kate Walbert's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue