In Search of Lost Books

This post was written on March 21, 2017.

The book I can’t remember has haunted me for thirty years.

In the book I can’t remember, there’s a boy named Ty. I see him with dark hair, a very young teenager, maybe even as young as eleven or twelve. He’s in a house. He’s hiding from someone or something, and he knows the being he’s hiding from is upstairs. In his palm is a small, smooth metal egg. This egg gives him the ability to travel through time--in fact, he’s traveled through time (forward or backward, I do not know) to get to the house he’s in now. The book is young adult science fiction. I loved it when I was a kid. It must have been published in the early 1990s or late 1980s. And though I’ve searched for this book for years, I’ve never been able to find out what it’s called. 

Until today.

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine was a fantastic article called “Stump the Bookseller,” about a blog by the same name that traffics in people’s futile and somewhat desperate searches for books they vaguely remember from their childhoods. The books they’re searching for are all very different, but their memories of them are specific and very limited--just an evocative snippet of an image or scene. By posting to the blog, they’re hoping someone will be able to recognize--and name--the book they’re referencing. Some searches are successful, with readers providing titles, Amazon links, ISBNs. Others receive no replies.

Today, I was going to post to Stump the Bookseller about my own lost book, the YA science fiction I used to check out from the library during the summers we spent with my grandparents in Fairport, NY, in the 1980s and 90s. My occasional internet searches over the years have proved fruitless, but, on a whim, today I Googled the bits I remembered: “ty time travel egg YA 1980s.” And, lo and behold, in the results was a Goodreads list of Children’s Time Travel Fiction of the 1980s. (By pausing here to all-caps shout THE INTERNET IS FREAKING AMAZING!!!, I show my age. So be it. Seriously, it’s freaking amazing.) And as I scrolled through the list, I found a book called The Green Futures of Tycho, by William Sleator, published in 1984. Here’s the summary from Goodreads:

When eleven-year-old Tycho discovers that the mysterious egg-shaped object he dug up in his garden is a time travel device, he can’t resist using his newfound power. Soon he is jumping back and forth in time, mostly to play tricks on his bossy older brothers and sister. But every time he uses the device, he notices that things are different when he gets back—and the futures he visits are getting darker and scarier. Then Tycho comes face-to-face with the most terrible thing of all: his grown-up self. Can Tycho prevent the terrible future he sees from coming true?

Tycho. Ty. The forbidding being he knows is lurking upstairs? His adult self, to whom his time-traveling has led him. I found the book.

I’m giddy. I can’t wait to read it again. A quick Amazon search shows a new hardcover copy priced at $2,128.00; a used paperback version is a more reasonable $15.00. I know the book can’t possibly be as gripping and wonderful as I remember, but having the ability now to buy the book, hold it in my hands, revisit those blurry scenes and bring them back into sharp specificity--it doesn’t feel as dramatic as reclaiming part of my childhood, but it also kind of does. 

In the article about the lost-book blog, writer Alice Gregory says, “Shared with nobody, inaccessible in full even to us, refracted through the consciousness of a now-remote self, memories of books we read while only partly sentient are among the weirdest we have.” A lost childhood book hovers endlessly on the periphery of real life, always on the outside of more meaningful and concrete memories that have piled up pompously in adulthood. This time, at long last, my lost book can fully enter my consciousness. Perhaps another lost book will swim blurrily to the surface now, and my next search can begin.