Paul Auster has a way of slowly and methodically sucking you into his novels.  “Oracle Night” is certainly one of those books.

The main character is an author who in the course of the story writes part of a book and a treatment for a screenplay.  Auster tells not only the author’s story, but also gives you these others within it.

Those other stories?  They’re kind of amazing too.  The portion of a book follows a guy who nearly gets killed while walking on the street, takes that as a breaking point from his old life, keeps walking and boards a plane to a new city to start over.  It’s a legitimate page-turner and my only disappointment with “Oracle Night” is that I don’t get to know what happens to him.

The film idea is equally great.  The author is asked to develop a script for a “War of the Worlds” movie, and since there is already a straight adaptation, he decides to take it in a new direction.  His idea partly involves people in the future who get to take one ride in a time machine to 200 years in the past in order to observe their ancestors.

You go at age 20, and the author writes that the purpose is to teach you humility and compassion for other people.

“The traveler will understand that he has come from an immense cauldron of contradictions and that among his antecedents are beggars and foold, saints and heroes, cripples and beauties, gentle souls and violent criminals, altruists and thieves.”

I would absolutely watch this movie, and support its implementation in real life.  If you happen to have a time machine, please get this going.

This book had me so into the story I didn’t stop to note many things along the way, but there’s one more bit that caught me attention.  The author’s wife is telling him about a dream in which they ended up in a locked room together.  He asks if she knew what happened to them and she says that’s when she woke up.

“People can’t die in their dreams, you know,” she says.  “Even if the door was locked, something would have happened to get us out.  That’s how it works.  As long as you’re dreaming, there’s always a way out.”

That last line belongs on t-shirts and Pinterest.