I’m assuming I’m not alone in this wish, but, basically, if I could get paid to be an English major for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty happy. I mean who wouldn’t love reading, and then listening to brilliant people explain said reading, day-in/day-out. (Choosing to have no responsibilities before 11 am wouldn’t be horrible, either.)

On that note, I got an enjoyable dose of my lecture-loving college days from this awesome blog post by author Frederick Reiken on The Book Lady’s Blog. Reiken is the author of the novel Day for Night (which I have not read) and he also teaches a class about novels that play with time. The post is essentially a mini-lecture on time manipulation in literature. A snippet: “What a conventional story-oriented narrative usually employs is a literary application of the temporal construct known as ‘block time’ or a ‘block universe’ – in which time is envisioned spatially, as if it were a four-dimensional space-time map.  That’s why we accept, without hesitation, the simple literary technique of a flashback.”

Reiken offers up a nifty list of novels that muck with the time-space continuum to great effect, including Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad and Charles Baxter’s First Light.  As for me, I’d cautiously add Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods to the list. It sort of fits in this category. Instead of using flashbacks to flesh out the complex protagonist of the novel, John Wade (a Vietnam vet turned failed politician who may or may not be involved in the disappearance of his wife), O’Brien uses “evidence chapters” in which people from Wade’s life offer stories about him. The device is so effective because the reader becomes the investigator in the overarching search for who Wade is, a search which rightly includes input from anyone who’s ever crossed his path.

Anyway, check out Reiken’s list, tell us some of your favorites…