Book review: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
One should never be bookless, I said, to a voracious reader friend. As soon as I finished Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, I borrowed books from her after speaking about what I feel like reading now. And boy, I am so excited about this phase where I am addicted to reading again!
Thanks again to Divya Iyer for reintroducing me to fiction, trying new authors and genres, and reading things that I may have never picked up in the normal course of my life.
Now, about the book. The back cover says -this is the story of Sam and Sadie. It’s not romance, but it is love. And truly that is what it is. Love, with its ups and downs, misunderstandings. Love which is friendship without taking a romantic angle. Love in which people create beautiful things – video games, in this case. Love in which there is hard work, caring, conflict, bitterness, and the entire range of human emotions possible. Sam and Sadie become friends at the tender age of 10 and 11, and the story traces their lives until their forties, when they have weathered a lot, celebrated success, grieved together, and generally spent a large part of their lives in each others presence.
I have never played video games much. Honestly there are some parts of it that I did not get. I did not think about how complex video games are/can be and how they might be created. I guess everything that is created does require a lot of thinking, video games, it seems, can be very complex. Barring somewhere towards the last one-fifth of the book, where there are present tense interactions between two gamers in a newly created game, the rest of it was quite readable. Here are some of the unique things that stood out for me in the book:
The parallels between life and gaming. How one gets a chance to start over again (and again) in a game, and how death could still mean more lifes.
The concept of love as friendship. The protagonists never romance, although they do consider it. Obviously when two young people spend so much of their life together, it is difficult not to ever think or wonder about being in a romantic relationship. Sam and Sadie, however, choose to put creative work together as their objective. The story is nice because well-intentioned and intelligent creators can have differences in ways no one can imagine, and these are brought out beautifully.
Living with pain, loss and grief. Much about living with physical pain is described in this book. It made me feel we don’t empathize enough with people who suffer on a daily basis. And the many different ways in which grief and loss can be described
There was a paragraph towards the end of the book, where Sadie tells Sam that they were successful in building video games because their timing was great – that sooner, or later, would have made it much harder. This reminded me of the entire concept of ‘Outliers’ where Malcom Gladwell laid out how timing (year/decade etc) makes a huge difference for inventors!
Lastly, the reference of Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow came in very late in the book. It was, perhaps, too dense for me 🙂
All in all, it was a good read.
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