Bookish Time Travel Tag

   
 I am giving some thought to the Bookish Time Travel Tag today. Thanks to Ms. Arachne Webster of A Canon of One's Own for tagging me. This is the brainchild of The Library Lizard and you can find her lovely blog here.

1. What is your favourite historical setting for a book?

  Well, that's such a hard question to answer. I do have a soft spot for the Tudors, thanks to Philippa Gregory, but it is probably the Victorian period as there were such tremendous changes over the century. The whole landscape changed as industrialisation took hold and I am particularly interested in how this affected the lives of women. 

 2.What writer/s would you like to travel back in time to meet?

I have to take as a given that Jane Austen would be a formidable person to meet. I would love to sit near her in the Pump Rooms at Bath and overhear  a conversation she was having with her sister Cassandra on everybody who she could see.

Someone else who has always fascinated me though is Jonathan Swift. He wrote such glorious, biting satire.
 

 3.What book/s would you travel back in time and give to your younger self?

It would probably be something by Virginia Woolf as I did not read any of her books as a student and think that I missed a lot. Mrs Dalloway would be a good place to start and of course a copy of her essay A Room of One's Own.

 
 4.What book/s would you travel forward in time and give to your older self?

Not an easy question to answer. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book, Le Petit Prince had a big effect on me when I was a teenager. It would be interesting to see what the older me made of it and if I could still find my 'inner child'! 

 5.What is your favourite futuristic setting from a book? E.g. Panem from The Hunger Games (said no one ever)


I absolutely loved Philip Pullman's, His Dark Materials trilogy, especially the parts where it was set in Oxford.

 6.What is your favourite book that is set in a different time period (can be historical or futuristic)?

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell which takes us to Victorian Manchester, to the lives of the everyday men and women. It blends social history with a well thought out story line and believable characters which gives you a real insight in how people lived and the changes which industrialisation made on their lives. 


 7.Spoiler Time: Do you ever skip ahead to the end of a book just to see what happens?

No I have managed to cure myself of that habit. 

 8.If you had a Time Turner, where would you go and what would you do?

It would have to be to go further back in time to the late 15th - early 16th century. I would love to be in the wings of The Globe Theatre, watching Shakespeare's The King's Men perform and hopefully see the great man at work. (Whoever he was). Even more exciting would be to watch them perform at court, especially during Elizabeth's reign when they were called The Lord Chamberlain's Men. Oh to sneak a peep at Elizabeth I, whilst I was there.


 9.Favourite book (if you have one) that includes time travel or takes place in multiple time periods?

Possession by A.S. Byatt ticks a lot of my boxes. Set in both present day and Victorian era, it follows two academics who are researching two Victorian poets. I thought it was such a well - structured book, with a lot to say about both time periods and lots of literary allusions, which I always love. 

 10. What book/series do you wish you could go back and read again for the first time?

Without a shadow of a doubt, it has to be John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Following the families through the generations and seeing the effect that one person's actions have had was fantastic, the first time around. 

Thanks to Ms Arachne Webster for tagging me and to The Library Lizard for devising the questions. If anyone wants to do it, consider yourself tagged. I have a feeling that if I was to answer them a second time, there would be a whole different set of answers which makes it quite fun to do. I can't believe that I have left out Mary Wollstonecraft, George Orwell, Isacc Asimov, John Wyndham, George Eliot, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy... the list goes on and on...