Time is a a capsule. It’s a bomb, it’s a card. My 1980s Webster dictionary uses two columns to define time, but what we need is Einstein. 

 Pop culture defines time in terms of decades and generations:  the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, as if specific trends can define a time period; and then there are the randomly assigned generations, the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, who may or may not be accurately described by eager sociological journalists.

Because of the internet, we’re always in a rush, comparing ourselves with people on social media who read 300 books a year. But Festina lente (“Hurry slowly”), as Augustus said. Speed is not the essence. Why not devote a week or a month to reading a classic?  It is the reading, not the numbers, that matter. And great literature does help you slow down time.

Anyway, forget about the clock and the card. Below is a list of books that take you out of time.

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, an experimental novel about the fragmentation of women’s lives in the 20th century.  Anna Wulf, a blocked writer, experiments in her notebooks with barely fictionalized accounts of her life, ranging from her years as a communist during World War II in Africa to her literary success in London and affairs with mostly married men.  The book is tied together by intermittent scenes in which  Anna and her best friend, Molly, an actress, discuss their lives as “free women.”

Anything by Charlotte Bronte.  Start with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (governess falls in love with Mr. Rochester but learns he has a mad wife in the attic), and then on to Villette, her best book, in which mousy, unemployed, penniless Lucy Snowe desperately travels to Belgium to seek work and finds a job as an English teacher. But the creepy headmistress spies on her, a fussy Catholic domineering male teacher becomes obsessed with her, and she falls in love with a doctor who does not find her attractive: he regards her as a friend. Much edgier than Jane Eyre, plus two psychedelic scenes, one of which occurs at night after Lucy is drugged by the headmistress.

Two Novels by Margaret Drabble.   I am a great fan of Drabble, and especially admire her early work. My two favorites, published respectively in 1972 and 1975, are The Needle’s Eye and The Realms of Gold. 

In The Needle’s Eye, set against a sophisticated sociopolitical background, we meet Rose, an idealistic heiress who gave away her millions to live ethically in a slum with her children. An unhappily married lawyer meets Rose at a party, and falls quietly in love. But this is not a love story.

In The Realms of Gold, Drabble again explores class and politics. Frances, a celebrity archaeologist and single mother of four children, left the provinces and invented a new life. Her career flourishes, but she suffers intermittently from depression, and has lost touch with her lover, Karel, a frazzled community college professor: a lost postcard delays their reunion. Frances also counters depression by daring to explore her roots, revisiting her unattractive hometown in the Midlands, recognizing the good and bad of the past. And part of the narrative is devoted to Frances’ second cousin, Janet Bird, a housewife with no real education or options. But for the grace of God… Time and place matter.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.  Anna Karenina, the most sympathetic adulteress in literature, ironically falls in love with handsome Vronsky on a trip to Moscow to negotiate peace between her adulterous brother and his wife, Dolly. A huge cast of characters is affected by the affair of Anna and Vronsky, including Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister, who had thought that Vronsky would propose to her, and Levin, a landowner rejected by Kitty because of Vronsky’s flirtation. And then there is Anna’s successful but unattractive husband, Karenin, who loses the respect of colleagues because of the stigma of his wife’s adultery. Karenine punitively forbids Anna to see their son, which devastates both mother and her son. 

I once read an essay by (or interview with?) Ian McEwan, who said that as he grew older he wondered how much time he had left to reread Anna Karenina. The late novelist Robert Hellenga said that he reread AK every year. I can’t compete with that, but I have read it more than once.

So these are some of my favorite books that do seem to slow down time when I read them. Do tell me about any absorbing books that do the same for you!