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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Eternal Dissident. Reattempting Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.
Some time ago I read an article talking about how literary publishing is experiencing something of an extreme Pareto distribution: every year, one book becomes the literary book that everyone is reading, to the point that its sales completely dwarf the sales of every other literary book published that year. In 2022, that book was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which a family member (I think my sister) gave to me some years ago and which I started reading earlier this week.
I'm as surprised as anyone to find that the hype is entirely warranted.
Seriously — of the 27 books I've read from start to finish this year, this is the best I've read so far and it's not even close. (I was only about a third of the way through it when I started to think it might achieve this accolade.) The last time I remember being so affected by a book was when I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in February of 2023. When I woke up this morning I was on page 236, and when I picked it up this afternoon, I found that I simply couldn't put it down, tearing through the remaining 242 pages in three sittings and finishing it all of ten minutes ago.
It concerns two childhood friends who reconnect as Harvard undergrads in the mid-nineties and, with the help of one of their dorm-mates, decide to design a video game together. As a gamer it was of particular interest to me, but even my family members who don't game enjoyed it, so don't let that put you off.
Tender, moving, perceptive, topical, gorgeous. The three main characters are so vividly drawn, I feel like I know them personally. I don't think I'd change a thing. I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.
Funnily enough, about a decade ago I attended a talk by Brenda Romero, an American game designer. (You might have heard of a certain project her husband John designed.) She was talking about a board game she'd designed as an art installation called Train. One of the characters in Tomorrow... designs a video game with a broadly similar premise, to the point that Romero publicly accused Zevin of plagiarism. I can certainly see the parallels, but it seems possible that it was a coincidence: even when Romero was describing the premise of Train I thought it sounded a bit trite. Creative works using the "actually it was the Holocaust all along" twist often come off as cheap and manipulative, and that's coming from someone who used exactly that twist in a short story he wrote (come to think of it, I was about the same age when I wrote it as the character is when she designs her video game).
Holy shit. You're not the first person to lavish this amount of praise on it, but it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?
I literally threw it away 3/4 of the way through. Shut it, walked outside to a dumpster, and dropped it in.
Anyway, sorry to be a wet blanket about it, but I'm continually baffled by the praise.
Agree with your overarching point though (re: Pareto distribution of modern literature). It's all becoming a lot more monolithic, for many reasons, and it's not a development I appreciate.
Okay, I know I said I wouldn't change a thing, and yet I did bristle a little at the culture war aspects.Marx just had to get murdered by a homophobic white American, didn't he? We couldn't dream of having him get killed by an Islamic extremist. This and the book I read immediately beforehand, Doxology, were published within five years of each other and mention 9/11 and the ensuing atmosphere prominently, but one of the ways you can tell they were written by Blue Tribers is that the authors express no curiosity about the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks at all: 9/11 is essentially just treated as a natural disaster, an act of God, something that just happened. But after Marx's death, the rest of the book is just about how Sadie and Sam process and come to terms with it, and the culture war implications of his murder are barely even touched upon.
But for all that, it didn't sully the emotional impact of the book for me one iota.
Try reading the aforementioned Doxology and come back to me.
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