Time Travel discussion
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A Wrinkle in Time: June 2016
I'm reading this for the first time. Can't wait!
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Just one thing. It wasnt really a time travel novel. It has space time sure but not actual time travel. Perhaps the sequels have time travel? If one calls this a time travel novel then might as well class the Narnia books as time travel as they have the same concept where time moves faster in one place/dimension.
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A lot of books listed as "time travel" aren't technically time travel. Still, it gets categorized everywhere as time travel and placed into time travel lists. So here we are! I'm really fuzzy on the time-related details of the book since I read it in the '80s. I do know that Many Waters (the 4th book in the series) has the kids traveling in time to meet Old-Testament-Bible Noah. That was my a favorite book of the series as a kid, but it was pretty awful upon an adult re-read. This one, so far is holding up.
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This is the cover I recall seeing when I was in elementary school.
This is one of my favorite books, even now that I'm a grownup.One of my favorite aspects of the book: the quotations that Mrs. Whatsit constantly drops into the conversation, and not just in English. As a kid, it really broadened my horizons to read quotes from Dostoyevsky, Einstein, Calderon...
Is it time-travel? Well, it address space-time, with the idea of a tesseract, so I suppose it qualifies.
I am re-reading this one. I read it when I was a kid (more than 30 years ago!) at the urging of my younger brother, and remember really liking it although now that I am re-reading it I hardly remember anything about it. Like Michele, I am liking the famous person quotes.
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That's the cover on the version that I read when I was a kid. My best friend had just read it, and I think I borrowed it from him. I remember having to hide it from my mom because there's no way I would have been allowed to read something with a cover like that. But it's such an enticing cover! And being verboten, of course it made it that much more appealing for sneak reading.
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L'Engle has created very distinct characters in this book. Which are your favorites? Do you identify with any of the characters in the book in any way?
I think my favorite character is Charles Wallace. I referred to him earlier as an "old soul", but I like how his mom describes him as "something new". He's so grown up for being just 5 years old. My 5-year-old uses a lots of advanced vocabulary words, but she certainly can't quote the definitions and tell which dictionary they came from. And she'd not get up in the middle of the night and make me hot cocoa and a sandwich (thank goodness since I am not fond of sandwiches). Also, there's no way I'd let her use to stove for hot cocoa. Charles Wallace is a very different 5-year-old. I remember relating to him as a kid somewhat, though, because I always acted like more of a grown up than a kid from an early age. But that's where the similarities ended.
I love the names of the old ladies who live in the haunted house, and Mrs. Whatsit is so eccentric. I'm having a lot of fun doing the voices for Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which since I'm reading this aloud. The book says Mrs. Whatsit has a voice like an unoiled gate (+ crackly old lady voice). Mrs. Who gets a soft voice like an owl. Mrs. Which has a soft, ethereal, snake-like voice.
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I just finished chapter 2...The book is nothing but a big mystery...who are these women in the old house...What is with Wallace and his intelligence at 5 years old and his apparent other abilities...
Where did the dad go?
So many mysteries....What kind of sheets were stolen? Bed sheets? paper sheets? Sheet music?
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Oh, they were bed sheets. You'll learn why and who soon enough. Think of the silliest reason you might need sheets, and you've got it!
I picked it up at the library. I have wanted to read this for a long time. Very excited!
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Oh, they were bed sheets. You'll learn why and who soon enough. Think of the silliest reason you might need sheets, and you've got it!"
So silly reasons to need sheets...
1. Toga Party
2. Find yourself in ancient Greece in a time travel adventure
3. Find yourself at a Toga Party in Ancient Greece in a time travel adventure.
4. Everyone knows you can tie sheets together for rope for the purposes of escaping a second, story window.
5. Tieing sheets to your wrists and ankles and going jumping on the trampoline on a windy day.
6. Tieing on a cape on for the purpose of flying superman style.
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Oh, they were bed sheets. You'll learn why and who soon enough. Think of the silliest reas..."
One of those might be correct ... or it might not.
Like Amy, I think my fave character so far (I am only up to chapter 4) is Charles Wallace. He is a young genius of course and I like the way the author portrays him. Unlike most young geniuses (at least according to the show "Scorpion,") Charles seems very extroverted. He is the only character I remember when I read the book a million years ago.
Amy wrote: I'm having a lot of fun doing the voices for Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which ..."When my kids were little, my wife used to do voices when she read to them. They loved it, and she's great at it too."
I like Charles Wallace a lot, but my favorite character has always been Meg. I see a lot of myself in her. And I love their mother -- we don't get to see much of Mrs Murry, but she seems like a very interesting multifaceted person: mother, wife, scientist, and good at all of them. I'm sure she must have flaws, but Meg doesn't see them so neither do we :)
I'm reading this pretty quickly and beginning to remember some things. There's a thing in Chapter 6, Pg 115+ which reminds me of something. I will put this in spoiler quotes so as not to spoil it for anyone. (view spoiler) I thought that kind of coincidental. :)
Paul wrote: "Eeen rimpel in de tijd"Love the title -- a "rimpel" !
The names she chose for the three "witches" are so great, too: Whatsit, Who, and Which :) They're very nondescript names, and yet all three have very different personalities. I can't remember which of them is always dropping quotes, but this one has stayed with me since the first time I read the book:...que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
...For all life is a dream,
and our dreams are dreams.
A story of time travel (destiny and all its siblings) with a major character named, "Calvin". Laughed out loud!I call this, "Beezus & Ramona meet the Pevensies". Engaging and enjoyable!
I've loved this since my 5th-grade teacher read it aloud to us, outside on the grass, during the first month of school. This was more than four decades ago, and I don't remember the cover.It does come up on a lot of lists. I've reread it for group discussions and for other occasions several times. So rich, so much to enjoy even upon rereads.
I don't really think of it as a Time Travel book, but nonetheless I think it's apt for this group to read it.
It's hard for me to pick a favorite character, but Calvin is the one I always had a crush on, and wanted to get to know better. Why is he so happy w/ the Murrays, and not so at his home...?
Of course I identified w/ Meg, being blind w/out my glasses... but she's much braver than I.
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Glynn, you might be onto something there. I wonder which came first: the song or the writing of the book. I can see how either one could have subconsciously (or consciously) influenced the other.
Cheryl wrote: "Calvin is the one I always had a crush on, and wanted to get to know better. Why is he so happy w/ the Murrays, and not so at his home...?"
I do like Calvin. The reason he's so excited to meet the Murrays seems to be multi-faceted. He's got so many siblings at home that it seems that he's usually forgotten. But it seems like the Murray home is perhaps more homey that what he's used to and has a mom that's more of the image of what he'd like a mom to be. Maybe she's busy and made stew over a bunsen burner in a lab, but she still made stew. Plus, he seems to instantly gravitate toward the intelligence of the family members. As someone who always felt like the odd person out in my family, I can understand the sentiment. A few summers ago, I went back to my hometown and visited the library where the books still are checked out the old fashioned way with a card in the back and a signature of everyone who had checked the book out. Every book that I pulled that I wanted to read had the signature of my high school best friend's mom. I ran into my friend's mom on the way out of the library and tried not to get all gushy. So I can understand Calvin very well.
Cheryl wrote: "It's hard for me to pick a favorite character, but Calvin is the one I always had a crush on, and wanted to get to know better. Why is he so happy w/ the Murrays, and not so at his home...?"The third book in the series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, shows you a lot more about Calvin's family.
(Sorry, my questions about Calvin were rhetorical... I was incompetently trying to imagine reading the book(s) for the first time, and asking those kinds of questions....)
Chapter Six: *simultaneously* condemning the deep flaws of of both post-WWII American consumerism ("Ticky-Tacky boxes" of Levittown and so on), *and* of socialism. These were the two globally-polarized systems at time of publication . The systems of both sides had more in common than some of us older would care to admit. Sorry if this seems over-reaching or left-field; at my age, my spectacles are Cold-War shaded.This simultaneous critique by L'Engle is brilliant.
It's not really a time travel novel -- they don't travel in time. Instead they tesseract, moving through the fifth (or some upper) dimension to essentially teleport through space. (Mrs. Who's explanation of how it works is very clear.)It's only time travel in that they go away and then come back to about the same time.
It is a pleasant book because the heroine is not pretty, not at an attractive age, and very intelligent.
The old ladies' visual description of the four dimensions -- the dot, the line, the box, the cube, and time -- has always stuck with me. So I don't think it's a fifth dimension, I think it's the fourth (time). If you think of space and time as a single interrelated continuum, i.e. spacetime (which we all do, because we've all watched Star Trek, right?) then wrinkling space is, by definition, also a wrinkle in time!
Michele wrote: "The old ladies' visual description of the four dimensions -- the dot, the line, the box, the cube, and time -- has always stuck with me. So I don't think it's a fifth dimension, I think it's the ..."
I think the concept of "spacetime" was relativly (no pun intended) new when this book was written. As I re-read this book I thought I remembered the tesseract thing differently. I thought the kids were in a house that was actually a tesseract. I googled this and now I realize I was thinking of a short story And He Built a Crooked House by Robert A. Heinlein, which is a very cool sci-fi story by the way! :)
No, the characters, and you and I, have four dimensions. We have length, width, height, and we are moving forward through time. If you could view us four-dimensionally we would look like earthworms, the length of your strand being seventy years or however long it is you live. (As Glynn says there is a Robert Heinlein story about this, too -- I think it's titled Life Line.)Since Meg and Calvin etc. continue on going through time in the usual way, breathing and talking and getting a minute older every sixty seconds, they are carrying their fourth dimension along with them. The tesseract is moving them through at least the fifth dimension.
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Oh, and that brings me to another theme common (I believe) to all of L'Engle's works. All of them are about mothers, worrying about the kids going off and getting lost. They have to be found again. And yes, it has to be set up so that the moms don't worry, because it is so scary to lose your kids.
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It is relatively common, for writers to write about the things that worry them the most. There's a whole raft of nuclear-holocaust novels or eco-disaster or we-lost-the-war subgenres. Or you can analyze the oeuvre of an author with this lens. Charles Dickens, for instance, clearly had a persistent worry early in his career about childhood. Boys are abandoned and left to scrabble for themselves, and it's scary because it happened to him and was horrific. What's the emotional engine of GONE WITH THE WIND? It's not the Civil War, that's just the backdrop. What it's really about is the worry that you could marry the wrong guy. Suppose I shouldn't have married Charles Hamilton or Frank Kennedy, and I should've hung tough all this time for Rhett Butler? In her biography you can read that Margaret Mitchell did exactly that. She married the safe sane guy, and let Rhett Butler go. And then she spent 1200 pages of novel worrying that she blew it. (And after she died the Rhett Butler guy spent the rest of his life dining out on the proposition that he was the original for the character.)
Amy wrote: "Interestingly enough, the first books of this series were written before all the child abduction scares. Thinking of it through that lens, it's a little creepy since these kids go off with a tramp ..."True. But L'Engle also sets up the characters so that the fact Charles Wallace trusts them means something. We know Charles Wallace has some extra knowledge, so his trust of the ladies carries more weight than it might have if he were just your average kid.
I just finished this. It was very good but not quite as I'd expected it to be. My favourite character was Meg I think because I can relate to her. Also I liked the red eyed man for some reason but I'm not sure why.
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Amy wrote: "Is it just me or does this book kind of drag in the middle? They basically travel by tesseract, discuss it, and look at things. It feels like more like the exploration of a concept than anything el..."I agree Amy, I got through the first third of it really quickly, and in the middle third I am not that motivated to pick it up, and find myself reading other things instead.
Nefeli wrote: "Also I liked the red eyed man for some reason but I'm not sure why. "Intriguing, Can you think about this and maybe figure it out? I'd be very interested to hear what it was about him that appealed to you.
Brenda wrote: If you could view us four-dimensionally we would look like earthworms, the length of your strand being seventy years or however long it is you live. (As Glynn says there is a Robert Heinlein story about this, too -- I think it's titled Life Line.)...."I remember that one too but the short story I was referring to is called "And He Built a Crooked House." In it, an architect designs and builds a house shaped like an unfolded tesseract. Then there's an earthquake and the house collapses into the fourth dimension. It's a very cool story.
Brenda wrote: "If you could view us four-dimensionally we would look like earthworms, the length of your strand being seventy years or however long it is you live."Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a great exploration of how a 2-D being might view a 3-D one. In A Wrinkle in Time, they do actually visit a 2-D planet (very briefly!).
Michele wrote: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a great exploration of how a 2-D being might view a 3-D one.Yes, I enjoyed that on too :)
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Nice List Amy "The One that gives kids nightmares" ...interesting!!
Lincoln wrote: "I took a break while my sister visited they are about to go into the central central intelligence building..."I like how it's not just "Central Intelligence" but "CENTRAL Central Intelligence." Like, it's even more central than you thought.
I also like the bit about "jammed minds" :)
plz remind me who the man with the red eyes is...
Cheryl wrote: "plz remind me who the man with the red eyes is..."It is the "man" they meet when they first get to Camazotz who spoke to them by reading their minds, who talked Charles Wallace into going into IT.
Time Travel
Books mentioned in this topic
The Magician's Nephew (other topics)Ayesha: The Return of She (other topics)
She (other topics)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (other topics)
A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Robert A. Heinlein (other topics)Madeleine L'Engle (other topics)
"It was a dark and stormy night."
No, really. The first line of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle might be a cliché these days, but it's the perfect beginning to this classic children's time travel tale which begins on a dark and stormy night in an attic bedroom. Read it again and relive the magic of this book or read it for the first time and meet all the wonderful characters from the 5-year-old with an old soul (Charles Wallace) to the strange women who live in the haunted house in the woods (Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which).
I've read the first 2 chapters aloud to my 5-year-old, and I'm falling in love with this book all over again. Some books really do stand up to time.
Goodreads Blurb
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.
"Wild nights are my glory," the unearthly stranger told them. "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract".
Meg's father had been experimenting with this fifth dimension of time travel when he mysteriously disappeared. Now the time has come for Meg, her friend Calvin, and Charles Wallace to rescue him. But can they outwit the forces of evil they will encounter on their heart-stopping journey through space?
Where to Find
Kindle $6.99: https://www.amazon.com/Wrinkle-Time-Q...
Amazon Hardcover $15.71: https://www.amazon.com/Wrinkle-Time-Q...
Amazon used: from 1¢ and up
From your local library: free
Questions
1. Who is re-reading and who is reading this for the first time?
2. L'Engle has created very distinct characters in this book. Which are your favorites? Do you identify with any of the characters in the book in any way?