Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts. Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
18mentions
17people
2015–2025years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My favorites that I read this year were:
- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games
- > I prefer junky fantasy books.
Kindle books like that are what fill in the gaps in my free time. One recent fantasy series I liked was The Good Guys/The Bad Guys by Eric Ugland. Somehow kept me turning pages.
some others (not fantasy) Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin;
But sometimes there is a lot of dreck to wade through.
Been thinking of making a "stop reading and discard book" list like:
- main character has unknown/dead parents, is secretly "the chosen one"
- no plot, character goes there, minimal opposition, gets all the stuff.
- anything harem
- Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Three-Body Problem
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin, fantastic writing, touching and insightful
"Tess of the d'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy. I'm huge Hardy fan but hadn't read his masterpiece until this year
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - This was best read of 2023 for me. The narration is very immersive and the author makes you very invested in the story. Shows the messy, complicated human side of things. And another plus was that it was about game dev, quite fun to learn about it through fiction.
- My non-fiction pile is very peculiar to me (maths, probability, gambling, Rust and Elixir books, a backlog of a load of recent Humble Bundle deals), but I have some solid fiction recommendations:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is the sort of novel where you start to get sad as the weight of unread pages in your right starts to lighten. A novel about some friends who build some games (set in the 1990s and 2000s, with references to games of that era), it's really about friendship, social awkwardness and creativity.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke can't really take a review. When I first of it in Literary Review, the reviewer refused to disclose any plot for fear of providing spoilers, and I'm the same. I can just tell you, it's lovely. Her writing has got even better since she wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and it's a really, really solid novel.
Yesterday, my Dad messaged me about a current read I'll share here as a warning, and because his style is just hilarious:
I treated myself to a copy of "A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett: short stories unearthed after his death. Very disappointing. If I were you, I would wait until it is available at your local library and then you could scrawl cuss words inside it without damaging your personal copy.
Solid advice that, I hope you'll agree.
