Top 5 Time Travel Books + Movies you Shouldn't miss!

I am jumping in with a Top 5 Wednesday topic this week. I haven't done one of these in a long time. This week had a topic that I’m able to do and had some time to do so I wanted to participate again and the topic this week is the top 5 books that feature time travel.

When I was thinking about this list, I wanted to focus on books where the characters physically travel through time and I also want to talk about a couple of movies at the end of this too.

Top 5 Time Travel Books + Movies you Shouldn't miss!

1) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I usually don't like to talk too much about what the Miss Peregrine series is about because I think you should go into it and discover that world on your own as the main character discovers it. There is time travel in this story, although that's not the main point of the story. It doesn't play a huge role but it is there, it's part of it and I enjoyed how it was done.

2) Here by Richard McGuire (Graphic novel)

This book has the most amazing concept. It focuses on one spot in a room of a house and the pages of this graphic novel flip back and forth throughout time so you can see what once was on that area of land and what's going to be there many years in the future or just a few days in the future. I did enjoy this concept.

3) Passenger by Alexandra Bracken

I read this book in January and I did not enjoy the pacing of this book, but talking about the time travel - I did enjoy that aspect of the story. I liked how it worked, how there were specific portals and only certain people could use them and they would take you to a different time AND different place.

So they were able to travel through space and time. I also like the adventure parts of this story where you are trying to find the correct passage through time that would get you to the next passage, that would get you to the next passage, all while trying to hunt down a specific powerful object.

4) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

I’ve only read the first book in this series. This story follows an English woman in the 1940s who is visiting Scotland and she touches these standing stones and somehow is transported back in time 200 years where there is this big war going on between the Scottish and the English. A lot of people accuse her of being an English spy and so she finds herself having to ally with this Scottish clan and getting caught up in their politics and their families.

This isn't a portal thing like the previous book I mentioned where she can just jump back home, she doesn't know how to get home. So I loved seeing the way that this book explored how you would adapt and go about living in the past. How much history do you know? And how are the skills that she knows from the future used to them, particularly in medicine?

5) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

This is my favorite book about time travel. It's about a school teacher whose friend tells him 'Hey, I have a portal in my basement to the 1960s and I think you should go back in time and try to stop the John F. Kennedy assassination.'

There's a lot of research (reasoning) in this book about how you could use time travel to stop an event and how it would affect how things turn out. The only problem with this time portal is that you can’t just pick and choose where you want to go.

It only takes you to like 1960, the same day. No matter how many times you come out and go back in, it puts you on the same day. It leads to a few years before the JFK assassination so when our character wants to go back to stop that event he has to wait several years in the past and make a life for himself in the past.

Stephen King is primarily a Horror writer, but it's not too scary (my opinion). It's just a little bit maybe unnerving at times. Like, thinking about all the different changes to the future that might happen. Those are my top five favorite books about time travel.

Movies:

Now I want to talk about some movies because when I was thinking about this topic there were a couple that I love or have seen recently that I just wanted to include here.

Starring Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson.

He plays a young man who has this genetic ability to travel through time. He can go back in time to a specific day in his life, in the same body. There are like 2 of them running around out there or anything. He can do things differently that day if he wants to and then he can jump back to the current age that he has lived to and things may be different in his life depending on if he took different actions.

One day he has a missed connection with a woman that he wanted to get to know and he uses his time-traveling ability to go back and meet her earlier so that they can be together. It's a heavily romantic story. There are some funny moments but I was touched by the things that it says about the importance of love and family and I just (sigh) I love this movie, guys!

Predestination.

Ethan Hawke's character is a person who can travel through time. It's his mission to travel in time and try to find an arsonist. Throughout the movie, he meets another character, played by Sarah Snook, and hears her life story and she ends up getting involved in the time-traveling as well. And it plays out most weirdly.

Like, this is a WEIRD film and it does things that you’re kind of uncomfortable with, and even though I was watching it and thinking 'Oh I see where this is going,' and then the movie would do it and I would be like 'OH MY GOSH I can't believe that they went there!' WHAT.

It was an interesting way of playing with time. It's not the action story that the opening scene will lead you to believe it is, there are some slower-paced moments, but if you like weird movies you would definitely like this one too.

Let me know if you guys have read any of those books or seen either of those movies. I would like to know what your favorite time travel book or movie is.