Books: Paradox Bound By Peter Clines (2017)

"Eli Teague lives in Sanders, Maine, the town that time forgot. A chance encounter with a Model A Ford and its driver when he was a kid sets Eli on a collision course with all of America's history. That is, if the faceless men don't get him first. Eli’s willing to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago. Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires? So when the traveler finally reappears in his life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange, dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake."

I did enjoy Peter Clines Paradox Bound (and I’ve always loved time travel stories) but it does comes off like a pitch for a multi-season SyFy TV show that will be cancelled before it can complete its arc. Much like The Fold, Clines borrows lots themes from other popular culture books, TV, and movie...and, of course, previous time travel stories –or history travel here. Beyond the obvious references to Back to the Future franchise (especially the third film, and mainly due to John Henry's train, the Steel Bucephalus, there are other references along the way) the book also seems also to allude classic Doctor Who with the books MacGuffin, the American Dream. Eli is told the American Dream is a physical thing, forged by the Egyptian god Ptah at the behest of the Founding Fathers, and stolen at some point in history (early 1963 apparently). It is much like the Key To Time arc that the Doctor went on during TOS 16^th season anyone who can get their hands on the American Dream has unlimited power to mold the future. So if thousands of people believe in the same thing, the Dream will do what it can to make it happen. This is also why it went missing. Since thousands of people were looking for it, it had to go missing in order for it to become true, thus creating a predestinational time loop, since no one would be looking for something that wasn't missing.

Through this history travel, Harry and Eli are perused by The Faceless Men, who are chasing the Searchers (who are everyday people from different timelines who are also search for this object. Here the book adds shades of River Song from modern Doctor Who, as these Searchers don’t tend to meet each other linearly). With utterly featureless faces, they wear masks and use hypnotic badges (or as I called them, perception filters) to make sure no one notices that the person they're talking to has no face. Originally tasked with protecting the Dream, after failing to keep it safe, they has doubled-down on their secondary job - keeping history intact from accidental  incursions created by the Searchers. There is a Biff like bully that has been terrorizing Eli since childhood and who is recruited (not by choice, though) into the Faceless Men.

As with all time travel tales, you need to have the hero (or heroine) make some leaps in logic and a lot of those leaps comes that toward the end. Some of the conclusions Eli reaches are a bit farfetched, especially considering he’s only been doing the time hopping business for a very short time and people like Harry (and others) have been doing it for years.

It’s a fun book and would probably make a good weekly TV series for those who only mildly enjoy science fiction. It’s no Quantum Leap, but it will hold your attention.

Books: From the Dust Returned By Ray Bradbury (2001)

"Enter the strange world of the Elliott family...it will change you forever in the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, a thousand-time great Grandmere existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she...existed. She is the grandmother of the Elliott family, which includes mind-readers, vampires and many others...maybe. In a strange old house, they gradually come together, mixing their arcane skills and life-styles, falling in and out of love and changing the world around them forever. You have never seen their like before."

From the Dust Returned is not really a novel, and even as short stories, does not really become anything to fully understand. There are lots of weird creatures with strange powers that are en route to a family homecoming at the Elliot house in Illinois. While there, we are told a few stories about some of them which seem to be almost entirely unlinked to each other but for the repeated appearance of a few of the characters. Some research brought up that the book originated as short stories written over a long period of time (1945 to around 2000) which Bradbury then brought together in 2001, writing linking portions to try to give it some kind of coherent structure. It really does not work, and I found myself struggling through it. Ray Bradbury’s lyrical prose is fantastic, but I began to ponder if this book was just simply designed to fulfill a contract (and he would only publish two more novels in the early ‘aughts before his death in 2012). I mean, in some sense, this book has a lot of typical dark fantasy that Bradbury always liked, with its themes of growing up and stop believing in magic, the supernatural, and the wonders of endless summers that come crashing when The October People arrive. But it’s mish-mash of weirdness, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and mummy’s fails to be a great book.

Books: Good Behavior By Donald E. Westlake (1985)

"John Dortmunder's one of the slyest burglars going. While fleeing the police during his latest caper, he falls through the roof of the Silent Sisterhood of St. Filumena -and tumbles into the lap of trouble. It's an act of God, the sisters exclaim. Only the Creator himself could have sent this criminal just when they needed him. Sure, they'll shelter him from the cops. But there's a price: He must help them to retrieve their youngest and newest member from her father's clutches. This promises to get sticky. Dear old dad hates the Sisterhood like the plague. And he happens to have an odd hobby: putting together mercenary armies."

Good Behavior, the sixth book in the John Dortmunder series, is another tale of pure delight. And much like the last book, Why Me, Donald E. Westlake continues to shift away from Andy Kelp being the jinx of the team and just make John have some sort of "curse" of bad luck. This sort of alters both the character and the nature of John's burglary career, and it's a weird transition from the first three or four books in the series, but it's noticeable. But not horrible in any way, though.

Like the rest of the Dortmunder tales, the book is filled with various hijinks, with some fun and some outright funny set pieces (Dortmunder's inadvertent recruitment into this army is the best of a lot of funny scenes), with great dialogue, along with poking fun at some lowlife characters that exist in New York of that bygone era (including the cops). One of the best things about this series is how different all the plots are -Westlake creates some pretty unique and clever things for Dortmunder to get out of. I've read as the series ages, the plots remain fairly tight, but seem to go on longer than the should. Even Good Behavior seemed to go on longer that it should, but that may just be my warped opinion.

Books: Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945 By Julia Boyd

"Without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what’s right in front of your eyes?

The events that took place in Germany between 1919 and 1945 were dramatic and terrible but there were also moments of confusion, of doubt – of hope. How easy was it to know what was actually going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by the propaganda or predict the Holocaust? Travelers in the Third Reich is a history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, journalists, fascists, artists, tourists, even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler – one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere."

You can’t go wrong with this thoroughly compelling book which details the rise of Hitler and fascism seen by travelers and other “real” people of the era. The book excels at telling stories, with author Julia Boyd’s skills shinning through. Most of the travelers Boyd describes generally fall into three categories: those who “had made up their minds as to which camp they belonged”, those who were naively or willfully ignorant “because Germany’s cultural heritage was simply too precious to renounce for politics, however unpleasant those politics might be”, and those who were just plain confused and baffled by what they experienced and observed. She also didn't shy away from being judgmental when it was appropriate as in her comment, “The historian Sir Arthur Bryant was another notable foreigner whose benign view of the Nazis lasted longer than was decent.”

While the Treaty of Versailles in 1918 brought an end to German dominance, it was also was the lightening rod that swept Hitler into power. But it’s the brilliant propaganda that allowed Germany to still be a glorious, unspoiled place to visit, all while in the shadows (at first) building a new war machine that was still doomed to failure.It still remains striking after 80 years how it all happened, how it all was ignored for so long. “Perhaps the chilling fact, “ Boyd writes, “to emerge from these travelers’ tales is that so many perfectly decent people could return home from Hitler’s Germany singing its praises.” And she points out that even in the late 1930’s it was still possible for forengers (including Americans) “to spend weeks in Germany and experience nothing more unpleasant than a puncture.” But she adds –and this seems prescience today- there “was a difference between ‘not seeing’ and ‘not knowing.’ And after Kristallnacht (a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany) on November 9, 1938, there could be no possible excuse for any foreign traveler to claim that they ‘did not know’ the Nazi’s true colors.”

It’s a disturbing book, coming off almost absurd in some people’s naivety. But the book also gives some insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes and its ultimate destruction.