Book #83: The Time Traveler's Wife

Title: The Time Traveler's Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Date started reading: June 13, 2012
Date finished reading:  June 15, 2012

Publish date: May 2004
ISBN: 978-0156029438
Number of pages: 564

Official summary: "A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant." (The Time Traveler's Wife)

Movie trailer:

How I obtained the book: Bought for $2.17 at used book store. It's a publisher's remainder book, not an actual used book

Memorable quotes:

• "It's hard being left behind. ... It's hard to be the one who stays. ... I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. ... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?" ~ Clare
• "What use is it knowing the future if you can't at least protect us from humiliating little scenes?" ~ Henry to Henry
• "I am afraid of the future; it seems like a big box waiting to me." ~ Clare
• "Sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can't do anything about it." ~ Clare to Henry
• "I feel like every time I blow my nose it's a historic event." ~ Clare 
• "The future is weird, and you can't go around behaving like you're invincible." ~ Henry
• "It's funny how memory erodes." ~ Henry
• "Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window." ~ Grandma to Clare
• "I've noticed that Henry needs an incredible amount of physical activity all the time in order to be happy. It's like hanging out with a greyhound." ~ Clare
•  "I feel like Dorothy, when her house crash-landed in Oz and the world turned from black and white to color. We're not in Kansas anymore." ~ Clare on how it feels to finally know Henry in present-time
• "My whole life is one long deja vu." ~ Henry
• "Most people are glued to the present; you get to be there again and again." ~ Clare to Henry
• "(Time travel is) not always a curse, okay? Sometimes time travel is a great thing." ~ Henry

My commentary:

• This is yet another book I'm reading because I liked the movie. I don't usually like big epic romantic movies like this, but this one I did love. What is it with Rachel McAdams and these movies? Frankly, no matter how many romantic movies I watch her in, I'll always see her as Regina George from "Mean Girls."
• I really loved the parts where present day Henry goes back in time to teach his child self how to steal things without being caught once he time-travels somewhere and appears out-of-thin-air and naked.  
• The movie was a very good representation of the book, in my opinion. Normally I feel like movies or TV shows leave out or change too much from a book, but in this case, the movie is good. The little things that were left out in translation didn't have to be included for the movie to be good.
• I had some issues following the book. I'm not much for non-linear timelines in books, but of course, I expected it to be totally non-linear. There was no way it would be linear. I kept having to go back and seeing how old Henry and Clare are supposed to be in each scene. That part annoyed me, but I lived with it. Eventually though, the book got boring to me. It dragged on too long. I think some of it could've been cut out and it would've been fine.

Buy on Amazon.com: The Time Traveler's Wife