Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, was a landmark volume in science writing and in world-wide acclaim and popularity, with more than 9 million copies in print globally. The original edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the ensuing years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic... (more)

Tuck Everlasting

by Natalie Babbitt

Tuck Everlasting is the story of a girl named Winnie and a family who she meets, the Tucks. The Tucks have a secret, they're immortal.They drank water from a spring that was actually a fountain of youth. Till the end of time, they will stay the way they were the moment they took a drink. Winnie falls in love with one of the Tucks, Jesse, a "17" year old boy who shares the same feelings for her.When Mae (Jesse's... (more)

Einstein's Dreams

by Alan Lightman

A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is... (more)

Incarnations of Immortality: Book 2

Bearing An Hourglass

by Piers Anthony

When life seemed pointless to Norton, he accepted the position as the Incarnation of Time, even though it meant living backward from present to past. The other seemingly all-powerful incantations of Immortality--Death, Fate, War, and Nature--made him welcome. Even Satan greeted him with gifts. But he soon discovered that the gifts were cunning traps and he had become enmeshed in a complex scheme of the Evil One to... (more)

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

by Brian Greene

From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe , comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way. Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and... (more)

The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's... (more)

Spin: Book 1

Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source,... (more)

Faster

The Acceleration of Just About Everything

by James Gleick

From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated auhtor of Genius and Chaos , a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world. Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even... (more)

Full Tilt

by Neal Shusterman

Sixteen-year-old Blake and his younger brother, Quinn, are exact opposites. Blake is the responsible member of the family. He constantly has to keep an eye on the fearless Quinn, whose thrill-seeking sometimes goes too far. But the stakes get higher when Blake has to chase Quinn into a bizarre phantom carnival that traps its customers forever. In order to escape, Blake must survive seven deadly rides by dawn,... (more)

Time Quintet: Book 1

A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L'Engle

Rediscover one of the most beloved children's books of all time: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle: Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their mother are having a midnight snack on a dark and stormy night when an unearthly stranger appears at their door. He claims to have been blown off course, and goes on to tell them that there is such a thing as a "tesseract," which, if you didn't know,... (more)

A Briefer History of Time

by Leonard Mlodinow, Stephen W. Hawking

From One of the Most Brilliant Minds of Our Time Comes a Book that Clarifies His Most Important Ideas Stephen Hawking’s worldwide bestseller, A Brief History of Time , remains one of the landmark volumes in scientific writing of our time. But for years readers have asked for a more accessible formulation of its key concepts—the nature of space and time, the role of God in creation, and the history and future... (more)

The Fermata (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Nicholson Baker

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.

Time's Arrow

by Martin Amis

"A novel that seems to have been written with the term 'tour de force' in mind . . . Amis's radical rethinking of time . . . brings the abomination of the Holocaust home to the jaded late-20th-century reader in a way that few conventional novels could." Village Voice Literary Supplement. "Splendid . . . bold . . . gripping from start to finish."--Los Angeles Times Book Review.

A Sideways Look at Time

by Jay Griffiths

A brilliant and poetic exploration of the way that we experience time in our everyday lives. Why does time seem so short? How does women's time differ from men's? Why does time seem to move slowly in the countryside and quickly in cities? How do different cultures around the world see time? In A Sideways Look at Time , Jay Griffiths takes readers on an extraordinary tour of time as we have never seen it... (more)

Tuesday

by David Wiesner

The unpredictable events of a particular Tuesday unroll before the reader with the precision and clarity of a silent movie. A Caldecott Medal book.

About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

by Paul Davies

An elegant, witty, and engaging exploration of the riddle of time, which examines the consequences of Einstein's theory of relativity and offers startling suggestions about what recent research may reveal. The eternal questions of science and religion were profoundly recast by Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications that time can be warped by motion and gravitation, and that it cannot be... (more)

The Unconsoled (Vintage International)

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Only the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day could have created this daring and stunningly inventive new novel. The Unconsoled gives readers what is at once a riveting psychological mystery, an acute satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public self has taken on a life of its own. "Ishiguro writes with his characteristic grace and off-beat pungency."--Los... (more)

Running Out of Time

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Run For Your Life Jessie lives with her family in the frontier village of Clifton, Indiana, in 1840 -- or so she believes. When diphtheria strikes the village and the children of Clifton start dying, Jessie's mother reveals a shocking secret -- it's actually 1996, and they are living in a reconstructed village that serves as a tourist site. In the world outside, medicine exists that can cure the dread disease,... (more)

Artemis Fowl: Book 5

Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony

by Eoin Colfer

Ten thousand years ago, humans and fairies fought a great battle. When the fairies realized they’d never win, they moved their civilization underground and hid. All the families agreed, except the demons. The demons planned to lift themselves out of time until they were ready to wage war on the humans once more. But the spell went wrong, and they were catapulted into Limbo. Now the spell’s deterioration is... (more)

Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age

Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age

by Gregg Braden

In this fascinating book, Gregg Braden merges the modern discoveries of nature’s patterns (fractals) with the ancient view of a cyclic universe. The result is a powerful model of time— fractal time —and a realistic window into what we can expect for the mysterious year 2012 . . . and beyond. Applying fractal time to the history of the world and life, he proposes that everything from the war and peace between... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: time

From the Big Bang to Black Holes

by Stephen W. Hawking