Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff

When we typically think of time travel, we envision hulking machines (or maybe just hulking Deloreans), blinking lights, and beeping alarms.  But sometimes, time travel isn't all whirring motors, blinking lights, and science fictional leaps through time and space.  Sometimes, you just happen to accidentally find yourself traveling through time, no extra equipment required.

Below are some of my favorite books dealing with unconventional time travel.

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

As far as time machines go, a magic telephone is pretty useless.

TV writer Georgie McCool can't actually visit the past -- all she can do is call it, and hope it picks up.

And hope he picks up.

Because once Georgie realizes she has a magic phone that calls into the past, all she wants to do is make things right with her husband, Neal.

Maybe she can fix the things in their past that seem unfixable in the present. Maybe this stupid phone is giving her a chance to start over ...

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a Maine town.  Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke…Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten…and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

After Kivrin Engles, a twenty-first century Oxford University history student, is accidentally sent back through time to medieval England during the time of the Black Death, she becomes stranded in the past.

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

Waking up in a modern London hospital 200 years after meeting his death on a Napoleonic battlefield, Nick Falcott is indoctrinated into a time-traveling society and returned to the side of a woman he loves to reclaim a vital talisman, a mission that places the fate of the future in his hands.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The love story of Henry and Claire whose lives are punctuated by Henry's disappearance to different points in time--sometimes even back to visit Claire as a young woman. When Henry meets Claire, he is twenty-eight, and she is twenty. He's a hip, handsome librarian; she is an art student with Botticelli hair. Henry has never met Claire before; Claire has known Henry since she was six...