BOOKS AND GOOFY

Time and Again by Jack Finney My rating: 3 of 5 stars Blurb (from Goodreads): Transported from the mid-twentieth century to New York City in the year 1882, Si Morley walks the fashionable "Ladies' Mile" of Broadway, is enchanted by the jingling sleigh bells in Central Park, and solves a 20th-century mystery by discovering its 19th-century roots. Falling in love with a beautiful young woman, he ultimately finds himself forced to choose between his lives in the present and the past. A story that will remain in the listener's memory, "Time and Again" is a remarkable blending of the troubled present and a nostalgic past, made vivid and extraordinarily moving by the images of a time that was...and perhaps still is. My thoughts: I didn't quite like the writing style of this book but the storyline was alright. I always pictured time travel to include a time machine but the method employed in this book seemed feasible enough. In reference to the plot...

Cover from Goodreads Blurb (from Goodreads ): In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human". Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer. My thoughts: This was another interesting book to review. The story transitions back and forth between the 'current time' (2059 - 2060) and the 'past' (2019). [Come to think of it, I have been reading a few books lately that use this writing style!]  ...

Cover from Goodreads Blurb (from  Goodreads ): Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition. Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpect...