Books that Feature…
Time Travel / Parallel Universes / Time Loops
Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review.
I’m a huge fan of books that feature time travel, parallel universes, alternate realities, etc. – the list goes on. I have a shelf on Goodreads for tracking “parallel timey stuff” for this reason, and have written countless blog posts about it: here and here to start. I thought this post could be fun since I haven’t written one in a while! I’ll feature books on my TBR that fall into these categories as well as some tried-and-true favorites for recommendations.
Timey TBR Books
I did my best to categorize these but obviously there’s some overlap for certain books. I consider there to be 4-5 main categories of timey-wimey books and will explain them in each section below!
Time Loops / Groundhog Day
This one involves someone repeating the same day or week etc. over and over again, like the movie Groundhog Day. I’ve read quite a few of these books but none SUPER nail it for me. There are a lot of directions the author can go with the ending but usually there’s something the person needs to learn before resuming life again.
Time Travel
There’s usually some kind of time travel element with a lot of the books in this whole post, but this section is really specific to actual time travel. These people are dealing with wormholes or going back or forth in time. These tend to have some science in them but a lot are unexplained as well.
Alternate Reality, Parallel Lives,
Sliding Doors (What if?)
This category is super fun and hard to explain with a simple title. Many of these books are similar in concept to the movie Sliding Doors. There are two timelines that the person is living or often going back and forth between. It’s like a “what if X happened in my life instead of Y?” kind of thing, typically. The person’s timeline or life is split in two and they can see both or pick one by the end, generally. Some of them take the “what if” concept and extend it into a second chance at something, like the first book featured in this section.
Parallel Universes
This is my favorite sub-subgenre within this subgenre! I love the idea of parallel universes existing and someone traveling between them or learning about the science of them.
Interacting with the Past or Future
There’s a bit of a time travel element with some of these but they’re not true time travel in my view – like going back and forth between now and the past or future. One of the books below involves texts to communicate with the past while the other two involve going backwards or forwards in time once, trying to come back to present day.
Favorite Books
These are some of my favorite books that involve reliving the past, time loops, parallel universes, and every other subgenre featured above. I did put them kind of in order with my all-time favorites toward the top and some really solid ones toward the end. All of these I’d highly recommend!
Ouh this isnt my fave but I have a few;
See you yesterday & opposite of always (groundhog day), the no-show (time travel)