The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story (Middle Falls Time Travel Series Book 1) by Shawn Inmon

read by Johnny Heller

Anybody who knows my taste in literature knows I’m a complete sucker for a time travel tale. Whether it’s a romp or a horror story, whether the fate of reality itself is at stake or just the fate of the protagonist and a few close friends, whether the story is beautifully thought out or the writer came up with a concept and just went for it, I’ll read it. Of course I appreciate something literary to sink my teeth into, and am delighted by a plot twist that actually surprises me (and that happens all too rarely anymore). But really, if a book is about someone traveling along the 4th dimension, I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.

So I’m not setting a high bar. But I will say that The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver was above-average delightful.

It starts with our eponymous protagonist, Thomas, as a middle-aged man who has wasted his entire life. After a stupid mistake in his youth led to a tragedy, he sank deeper and deeper into depression over the decades, doing absolutely nothing of worth to himself or anyone else and not especially enjoying himself in the process. One day the final straw lands, and he decides to do himself in. He closes his eyes for the final time in 2016…

...and opens them in 1976, in his bedroom, in his 15-year-old body, with all his memories intact. After some disorientation, he figures out that it’s a few months before the tragedy. He’s got a second chance--maybe he can do things right this time. And while he’s at it, maybe he can stop a serial killer.

And then—well, and then he learns he’s not the only one to have traveled through time in exactly that fashion.

The tone of this book is by turns creepily suspenseful and thoughtfully hopeful. The author does a great job of putting you right back in 1976—if you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll instantly feel the verisimilitude of his depiction. It’ll feel almost claustrophobically like going back there. If you’re not old enough to remember it—well, here’s your chance to get a glimpse.

Our protagonist feels very believable. He vacillates between a burning desire to fix the wrong things and despair that they can’t be fixed. Also between an adult sense of agency and responsibility and the weird in-between passivity and acceptance of life of the young teenager. (As someone who moved back in with her parents to finish grad school, I can tell you that this is a thing.)

Thomas is a bit of a dufus, though, I will say. A well-intentioned dufus, but a dufus all the same. He just doesn’t seem to think things through. And we can’t blame it on him not being a science fiction geek and therefore never having thought about the potential consequences of his actions. He mentions, near the beginning of the story, having read some books and watched some movies about time travel, and being familiar with the “butterfly effect.” 

Maybe some of his dufosity can be explained by the fact that, although he has all of his memories from his adult life through 2016, he’s now back in the body of a teenage boy, all hormones and undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Our narrator is definitely unreliable, so it’s probably that, rather than lazy plotting. In any case, you’ll want to slap him sometimes.

Fortunately the story doesn’t revolve around his tendency to make mysteriously stupid mistakes. Instead it revolves around free will and the nature of causality, like any self-respecting time travel tale. Also around the interactions between Thomas and the other time-traveler, and the ripples (both emotional and in the time-space continuum) those interactions create. And the book leaves some mysteries unsolved--maybe because it follows Thomas’ point of view so closely and he doesn’t learn everything there is to be learned, or maybe because it’s the first of a series and the author wants to leave the reader curious.

Speaking of that, once the denouement becomes apparent on the horizon the book does seem to draw itself to its conclusion very quickly. In spite of which, the ending isn’t at all unsatisfying—if anything, it’s more satisfying than I expected.

In conclusion, if you’re not a fan of time travel novels, this one probably won’t convert you. But if you are, you’ll find it intriguing and mysterious and creepy and sweet, and you’ll enjoy meeting all the characters and getting lost in the setting. And maybe being surprised by some of the twists.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

read by Joe Hurley, Keith Richards, and Johnny Depp

If you’re above a certain age, it may surprise you to learn that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger aren’t baby boomers. They’re members of the Silent Generation, by two or three years. But the band they formed, along with Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart is such an intrinsic part of the baby boom generation that I think we’ve got to give them honorary membership. To this day, if you want a lively debate among Boomers (not to mention a significant portion of Genexers), all you’ve got to say is three words: “Beatles or Stones?”

And Keith Richards’ autobiography is necessarily a biography of the Rolling Stones—from his point of view, of course. And it turns out that he is disarmingly charming. James Fox captured his voice, first over hundreds of hours of interviews, then in writing—and he did a fantastic job. If you listen to the audiobook, Johnny Depp does some of the narration (mostly in the first few chapters and then again for a bit near the end) but Keith does quite a lot of it himself, and it’s wonderful to hear his stories.

For me the most fascinating part was how the band got together, and then their early days—both before they became famous and then after they really caught on. There was a certain early-to-mid-career part, where the sex and drugs were very present but not yet all-consuming, where Keith was fascinated with learning and perfecting his five-string open tuning, and when the relationship with Anita Pallenberg was first occurring and then was at its best, that feels to me like a golden age—if not in Keith’s life, then in the course of the book. 

But his recounting of how heroin took over his life, and heroin and paranoia took over Anita’s, and all the difficulties with parenting and with the deterioration of the friendship between Keith and Mick, is also deeply interesting. All of that went into making Keith the person he is at the end of the book, too—that, and the various deaths in his circle of family and friends and co-famous-people, and new relationships we don’t get to hear so much about anymore.

It’s not possible for me to listen to the Rolling Stones with new ears. I’m too familiar with their canon up to about Tattoo You, and I don’t care enough about anything they produced after that. But after listening to this book, and stopping frequently to listen to the song being discussed, I can say I have listened to their work with, at least, new appreciation. For the history of each track, of course, but also for the artistry that went into so much deceptive simplicity. And there was definitely artistry—technique and concept both. Keith geeks out about all this in several places, and I found it oddly charming.

In the end I can say that Keith Richards is a man of depth and complexity who follows all of his passions well beyond the dictates of common sense—which is the reason for his genius as well as numerous brushes with the law and with death. In short, he lives up to his reputation. 

Which is not to say that all of the rumors are true; according to him, at least, some are and some aren’t. And the truth behind at least one major one will remain forever a mystery if he has his say. No, I won’t tell you which is which. Read the book! Go on, I dare you.