Time Travel Is Lonely - Sci-Fi Novel About Solitude in Time Travel | Perfect for Book Clubs & Sci-Fi Enthusiasts

I wander thro' each charter'd aisle,Near where the indie'd rock does flowAnd mark in every album worthwhileMarks of love, marks of "whoa" Wandering through the misbegotten aisles of a cherished music store, in the "used" section where diamonds await to be found like buried treasure in the muck, I found such treasure just about a week ago. Having seen the name, it caught my eye. I know this guy- he's friends with The Mountain Goats, otherwise known as John Darnielle. Some type of relationship there, probably from "We Shall All Be Healed," The Mountain Goats most recent that I reviewed last year. That's about all I knew- well, I did sneak a listen to one of Vanderslice's albums on the internet a long while ago and left him all but forgotten (one of those times where it sounds alright, but it just isn't the right time or mood). So, at $6.99, I made an extraneous impulse purchase and am now able to pat myself on the back once again for my incredible taste in music, even concerning music that I have completely no idea what it really sounds like. Now, it's your turn to pat yourself on the back for reading this because you can go buy it and impress all your friends and they'll tell all their friends, and so on, and then this three year old album will become some type of runaway hit just because I came across it in a record store in Ohio. Back to the top, once again, and you'll notice I fudged one of William Blake's little written things to describe my experience in finding this album. Vanderslice does the same on a song called "if I live or if I die," although he doesn't even bother to change the words from Blake's "Little Fly, Your Summer's Play," he just rips it straight off and adds music. AND IT ROCKS! Not rocks like hard rock or anything because that definitely doesn't rock, but rocks like sweet minor chord piano with unpronounceable percussiony blippy blurps and bleeps sprinkled throughout. Then Vanderslice rips off some of his brother Jesse's stuff that he sends him from his little hideaway in the Antarctic where he works for the National Science Foundation and begins going all "Polar Madness" because he experiences spontaneous trance states and alternations in consciousness induced by his exposure to the Antarctic's isolation (and I tell my students not to write run on sentences...). If those letters are to be believed, then this is a charmingly and geniously crafted album loosely based around these letters his brother sends home expressing his loneliness and isolation and the things he writes about (including William Blake and the Internet). If not, then he sure did go take a lot of time to fake a lot of letters, and therefore he should spend less time writing fake letters to himself and making more sweet indie rock for us to idolize.