Time Travel

Welcome back for another Top 5 Wednesday post! I hope you have all had a good week since my last post. This week, we are discussing a really interesting and exciting topic! I am sure we can all agree that the idea of time travel seems really exciting. Being able to either travel back to the past or fast forward to the future just seems like an amazing experience. I am currently picturing the various scenes from Back to the Future, which I enjoyed watching in my childhood! It may just be me, but I would love to be able to travel in time. Anyway, the possibility of my time travelling any time soon seems to be extremely remote. To be honest, it is so remote that I will probably never be able to travel in time. On this topic, though, do you think time travel will ever be possible? Or another good question, in the Back to the Future movies, they predicted we would have flying cars in 2015, do you think we can ever expect to see flying cars and if so in how many years? Let me know in the comments!

Anyway, it seems like I am getting better week after week at going off-topic when I'm writing these posts. This week's prompt is about books which either travel back in time or fast forward to a not-too-distant future. Whereas last week I took quite a strict approach in the books I chose, this week I may have to be more lenient and just look at books set in the past or future rather than books which actually involve time travel as I do not actually think I have read many or in fact any such books. In some cases, I may base it on recently published books that take the present-day reader either back to the future or the past. As such, some of the books on this list may have also come up in one of last month's Top 5 Wednesday posts about robots. In no particular order shall we get straight into it!

1. Mindbreaker by Kate Dylan

This was an interesting book and, I think, one of the books which made it into the Top 5 Wednesday post on robots/futuristic reads. This is about a girl who has become ill from some kind of disaster due to the increasingly technological world, and as a result, she is about to die, but a technology company saves her and essentially puts her mind and personality into a robot. This book definitely looks into issues of free will and consent, but it does appear this book takes you time travelling to the future where technology has taken over even more of the world, but also it would be good if you could save people's lives or improve quality of life by transferring people to robots. However, this would raise a number of ethical and moral questions.  

2. Shadow of the West by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman

We now go travelling back in time to the past, more specifically to 70s Berlin during the Cold War when the city was divided. This is very much a love story and one of friendship, but the reader learns so much about life in Berlin during the Cold War and how different both sides of the wall actually were. I find historical fictional books particularly good as they can be a more engaging and imaginative way of learning about history for younger readers, especially when the author includes themes that the readers like. 

3. The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz by Ellie Midwood

We again travel back to the past, and this time, we are staying close to Germany but in Poland to visit Auschwitz. This a place I really want to visit in real life as the Holocaust was one of the worst events in History, and so, in general, it is important that we learn about the event and never forget it so we can hope such events will not occur again, but also it is important to remember and pay our respects to those victims of the holocaust. It was hard to pick just one book as I have read so many, but this was a particularly interesting book. Generally speaking, these books take us back into the past to educate us about the events of the holocaust as well as honouring some people who were victims; although these books are often dramatised, the basic underlying story is true. These books, in general, are really gripping and will have the reader on the edge of their seats.

4. Online Courts and the Future of Justice by Richard Susskind

We now travel back to the future for our first entirely non-fiction book, which looks at the legal system, mainly in England and Wales, but the contents of this book can easily have global application. Susskind essentially puts forward a very convincing argument for some online court cases, being careful to make it clear that he does not think all court cases should be online. I think this could be a great and valuable idea. I would probably go further, arguing that the public should always be allowed to watch a court trial on an online secure platform due to the open justice principle but that only some court cases, both criminal and civil, should take place online. It is well beyond the scope of this post for me to get into detail about the argument for online courts, but this book really does make us time-travel to the future and see what our justice system may look like.

5. Last Chance by Mocha VonBee

Finally, we travel back to the past to Ireland in the 1990s for another romance-related book series featuring Kit and Tully. It is always amazing reading this series and realising just how much has changed! For instance, not having any mobile phones seems really bizarre to the modern reader, but this also adds tension to the plot, making the books more gripping for the reader. One thing I think we can say, though, is that life seems simpler back in the 1990s with no mobile phones, no social media, no cyberbullying or any of the other negative parts of modern society which seem inescapable in the present day.

Thank you for reading this week's post; I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. As mentioned in the introduction, please use the comment section below to say hello and even share your top books that have an element of time travel. Please also feel free to explore my blog and the various book reviews and Top 5 Wednesday posts (and so much more) that it has to offer. See you next week!

 
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Comments

  1. I am fascinated by time travel but ironically don't read many books about it. I have also done past and future books with one time travel one.

    Have a great week!

    Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog
    My post:
    https://budgettalesblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/15/goodreads-top-5-wednesday-time-travel/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, very much the same here! Maybe its just an area where there are not many books just yet. Why? Who knows! Hope you have a great week too!

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