time travel fiction | Bookshelf Fantasies

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is a Genre freebie, with the prompt: Pick any genre you’d like and build a list around it. You can even narrow the topic if you’d like, such as: thrillers with unreliable narrators, fantasy romance with fae characters, or historical romance with suspense elements.

I considered and discarded a bunch of options before settling on time travel as my theme for the week. I’m sure I must have covered this topic before — many times!! — but it’s just such a good one, and there are always more books to add.

Here are some favorite, beloved time travel books*… plus a smaller handful that I read but didn’t love, although in most cases, there were at least a few elements to appreciate.

*Technically, these aren’t all exactly time travel. Some just have time-related weirdness (such as extraordinarily long lives) that make me include them in this category!

LOVED:

Best of the best:

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (of course!)
The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley
A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong
A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
A Witch in Time by Constance Sayers
Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald
Time Was by Ian McDonald
Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer
The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson**
The Hundred Loves of Juliet by Evelyn Skye

**Which I read because of my undying love for the gorgeous movie version! Which I really must watch again one of these days…

LIKED (or merely tolerated):

All of these have at least something interesting about them, but for various reasons, simply did not work exceptionally well for me.

The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Do you have any favorite time travel books?

What genre did you focus on this week? If you wrote a TTT list, please share your link!

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Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Books to Read If You Love/Loved X (X can be a genre, specific book, author, movie/TV show, etc.). I’m in the midst of an Outlander obsession at the moment, with the long-awaited book #9 coming out NEXT WEEK… so you’ll excuse me if this series is pretty much all that’s on my mind right now.

Here are 10 books I think Outlander fans should check out:

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley

What’s the connection?

Set in Scotland, historical fiction, Jacobite uprising, time-slip romance (and really, can’t go wrong with any of this author’s books!)

Clanlands by Sam Heughan & Graham McTavish

What’s the connection?

Outlander stars (!!), fun facts about Scotland, lots of references to the creation and filming of the Outlander TV series

A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

What’s the connection?

A romance across time, time travel, lovers from different eras

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

What’s the connection:

Strong female lead character, male lead who seems too good to be true, time travel (in book #2), epic romance

Finding Fraser by KC Dyer

What’s the connection?

You literally could not be more connected to Outlander! A romantic adventure in which the main character heads to Scotland to find her very own Jamie Fraser.