On Books: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 Dear Reader!

My apologies. It has been a very long time since last I wrote. I wish I could say its because I have been so busy, but that would be mostly untrue. We did have a period of busyness whilst we searched for our permanent home, but that task has been accomplished and now it is just sit and wait. 

I sit and wait for my job to start in September. I sit and wait to move into our new home. I sit and wait and sit and wait. I've lots of books and crosswords and the BBC to keep me company and of course my walks in Richmond Park. 

I joined a book club at my local bookshop. The book for August was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a great book. I loved it. I have lived on the periphery of the gaming industry for many years so lots of it struck home for me. The book club's opinion was divided however -- about half the group loved it and half the group did not. It was largely divided on age: Boomer v. Gen X and Millennials. LOL

Why I loved it

There are two main characters, one of whom is living a life with chronic pain and one of whom is living with the deep shame of a past transgression. Much of the conflict in the story is based on how those two manage their relationship through the filter of their respective challenges. I thought there was a lot that was really insightful on the part of the author. She also deeply understands the life of a creative professional and what it means to create and put things out in the world for the audience to love or hate and how that affects your self esteem and productivity as a creator. There is no clear "hero", everyone is human and flawed and does the best they can with what they have to work with. I also love Zevin's mastery of scene painting. For example, early in the book she perfectly captures Sam's social anxiety with her description of the crowd in a busy train station in Boston, Massachusetts: "But this crowd would not be avoided." thus personifying the entity that is the crowd and giving it agency. If you have this type of anxiety, you perfectly understand what she has captured here. 

The story jumps around in time and she fills in detail from the future occasionally in her description of the present: "She drank a bit of the wine he poured her--she would never be much of a drinker--and she felt light-headed, distantly nauseous, but not drunk." playing around with tense kind of like how you move through a video game going back and forth in time as you go back to replay parts of the game. You know some future details as you replay this bit to learn how to get past the section to move to the next level. 

I also loved a chapter where one character is in a coma and we experience the world first-hand from his perspective. It was a particularly moving part of the story. 

One criticism of the book that I agreed with is the use of the quote from the Scottish Play as the title. The author gives us an explanation toward the end of the story, but it doesn't ring true for me. Frankly, through the whole book, I was expecting themes from the Scottish Play to emerge, but they don't. I was wondering the whole way along when it would be obvious what was meant by the title. When we do get the explanation, it just doesn't make sense to me. However, that did not affect my enjoyment of the book overmuch and I highly recommend it. 8/10

Our next book is Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie. I'm about halfway through and my thoughts are that the plot is very strong and much clearer than Zevin's book, but I would argue that Shamsie doesn't have the same gift for poetic use of the language that Zevin has. It is still a great book, and I am enjoying it. 

My local bookshop has also got a writing club, so I have been dipping my toes back into creative writing. I have put forward a piece of writing for critique at our next meeting. My guts are in knots. It has been such a long time since I wrote for the fun of it. Wish me luck, dear reader.