"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

 

This entertaining book felt like YA written for adults. I wasn't surprised that John Green, author of YA classics such as The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and Paper Towns called it "one of the best books I've ever read." 

It is propaganda for the American Dream: that hard work allied with capitalism will make you rich (though it helps to be incredible talented). In this sense, it reminded me of that other fantasy about hard-working geniuses, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, though T&T&T has far less misery.

Sam is half-Jewish, half-Korean, handicapped after his foot was injured in a car accident, but he is a math genius so he gets into Harvard. Sadie has a better start in life but she is sufficiently brainy not only to get into MIT but to be an outstanding student. Marx has rich Japanese parents and he's at Harvard. They take time out from their studies to create a computer game and set up their own company to sell it. They work incredibly long hours so, of course, the game is hugely successful. An everyday story of typical folk this is not. 

It is written in the past tense. At first sight it appears to adopt a multi-third-person-close perspective but given the fact that the narrator repeatedly chips in with exposition, character notes and back story, it is more like third-person-omniscient.

A feature of the narrative style is the remarkable amount of exposition. Time and again, something happens and we then cut to an explanation, usually involving back-story but also frequently describing character. For example:

• “Without knowing why, Sam had tried to keep Sadie and Marx apart. It wasn't about either of them as individuals. But Sam could be private, verging on paranoid, and he liked to control the flow of information. He feared them comparing notes and somehow ganging up on him ... No one, Sam felt, had ever loved him except those who had been obligated to love him: his mother (before she had died), his grandparents, Sadie (disputed hospital volunteer), Marx (his assigned roommate).” (2.2)
• “Marx was great at being in love, for a bit, and certainly, no one ever left a relationship with Marx feeling abused or hurt. He had the gift of letting people think it was their idea to end the relationship, thereby converting most of his ex-lovers into friends.” (2.3)
• “She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things - a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. ...” (3.3)
• “Including Lola, Sam had had four different sexual partners in his life, and he had never enjoyed sex with any of them. He had slept with one boy and three girls. While no one had ever mistreated him, sex had given him considerably less pleasure than masturbation. He did not like to be naked in front of other people. He did not like the messiness of sex - it's fluids, it's sounds, it's smells. He worried that his body could not be relied upon.” (3.4a)
• “He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet.” (5.2)

 This is, I suppose, a good way of giving lots of information while keeping the story moving along at a swift pace. This is already a long book and I imagine it would be much longer had the author tried to 'show don't tell'. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. It was a fast-paced entertaining blockbuster. But the repeated nuggets of exposition meant I was being told how to perceive the characters, rather than being allowed to find out about them for myself.

Selected quotes:

• “A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say ‘Excuse me’ while meaning ‘Screw you’.” (1.1)
• “It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before.” (1.2)
• “Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience.” (1.3)
• “A bromide about the creative process is that an artist's first idea is usually the best one.” (2.2)
• “The alternative to [cultural] appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you?” (2.2)
• “Beauty ... is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.” (2.2)
• “When Sadie was asked a question ... she gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. ... When Sam was asked a question, he turned into a novella.” (3.2)
• “Marx is always in love. He's an emotional harlot. What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?” (3.3)
• “The last thing she packed were the handcuffs. She slipped them into the zippered pocket of the large duffel she was planning to check. She didn't want Dov to use them on some other girl. She wasn't sure if this impulse came from a sense of sorority or sentimentality.” (3.5)
• “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.” (4.3a)
• “The whiteboard was no longer white, and its permanent palimpsest was an archive.” (4.1)
• “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it's a perfect time to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.” (5.1)
• “It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.” (5.2)
• “She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)” (5,2)
• “It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.” (6.2)

March 2026; 478 pages

First published in the USA by Alfred P Knopf in 2022

My Vintage (Penguin) paperback was issued in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Basilisk" by Matt Wixey

Purporting to have been sent as an attachment to an anonymised email, the narrative is interspersed with comments from 'Holly Soames' who appears to be a law enforcement officer. The main story, told by protagonist Alex Webster, describes how she and her friend and colleague Jay Morton, both pentesters (computer hackers who are hired to seek out the vulnerabilities in a computer system in order that the hiring company can put safeguards into place), start playing a computer game in which they have to answer puzzles set by a shadowy character called The Helmsman; each puzzle solved is rewarded with a chapter of The Helmsman Texts - part autobiography, part philosophical treatise - the final chapter of which will be the basilisk, a cognitive hack which may drive a person insane.

The Helmsman Texts interrupt the novel narrative. To some extent it feels as if the purpose of the book was to present the philosophy in a way that a reader of horror, or speculative fiction, would tolerate. The first chapter considered Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the second described a cockroach invasion and discussed the possibilities of subliminal influencing, the fourth suggested that things such as religion and language could be considered a virus and the fifth promises the basilisk. We are never given the final chapter. The Texts include email chains, bibliographies, and playlets; the author has certainly been innovative. There's even a cryptic crossword (as a connoisseur I was a little disappointed in this). 

It's fundamentally an attempt to update the horror novel (“A long slow river leading to Kurtz.”; Ch 9) to the world of the internet. This was, for me, where it was weakest. The opposition, referred to only by a blanked out piece of text, were strange people with huge fixed smiles, half religious missionaries, half 'Men in black' clones. Their fundamental mission is for people to be happy which meant persuading them to stop playing the Helmsman's game, if necessary by killing them. Of course Alex and Jay, addicted to curiosity - rather like the teenagers in a horror film who, one by one, go down into the cellar - ignore the warnings. Much is made of the allegory of Eve plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The epigram is "ceci n'est pas un livre", French for 'this is not a book', a play on the famous Magritte painting of a pipe with the caption 'ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Presumably this is an example of the type of cognitive hack mentioned in the Helmsman Texts; the idea that if you can subvert a person's understanding of reality, you will drive them mad.

A book for someone who likes puzzles. Plot and style are much more important than character. It reminded me very much of another book which it quotes several times: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hoftstadter.

I learned a great deal about hacking, including too many initials. I also realised, I think, why the Helmsman was called the Helmsman, something neither Jay not Alex seemed to fathom. The ancient Greek word for helmsman, or navigator, is κυβερνήτης, transliterated as kŭbernḗtēs, from which we derive the word 'cyber', cybernetics having been originally a science studying systems and their control.

Selected quotes:

• “On learning that we are being fucked, three questions present themselves: What am I being fucked by? Who is responsible for the fucking? And can I ameliorate the situation so that I am fucked as minimally as possible, and ideally not at all.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a hacker is to dance to hidden tunes ... It is to rewrite the song and repurpose the instruments. make a piano sound like a guitar; disguise a vuvuzela as a clarinet to get it past security; redesign a flute so that it produces the flatulent bellow of a tuba. All because we can.” (Ch 2)
• “There is precious little good fiction which concerns itself with hacking.” (Ch 4)
• “A significant amount of human effort ... is spent attempting to control the minds of others.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “The argument that religion is a virus has been made before ... It is often hereditary, but also transmitted through friends and acquaintances. It causes marked and bizarre changes in behaviour, including, but not limited to: changes in diet; an inability to consider certain things rationally; a sometimes fanatical adherence to arbitrary codes of morality; the mutilation of children's genitals; an irrational hatred of people infected by a slightly different strain; and, in its most extreme forms, violence, murder, and suicide.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Convincing a person to cause significant harm to themselves or others is difficult ... Cassius uses astroturfing to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar .... Lady Macbeth plays to Macbeth’s ambition to persuade him to kill Duncan ... Satan uses ‘perswasive words, impegn’d with Reason’ to convince Eve to consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Human behaviour can be drastically altered as a consequence of ingesting new knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “I find myself thinking whether there are ever glitches in reality, strange loops that repeat like records skipping forever. Little pockets of time that replay constantly while the world moves around them.” (Ch 7)
• “I've often thought that Otto is the human equivalent of vanilla - that if you cut him he would bleed beige, and it would congeal to look and smell like cold Ready Brek.” (Ch 7)
• “If we were to be arrested for our thoughtcrimes the overwhelming majority of the human race would be in handcuffs.” (Ch 7)
• “Thought experiments ... have changed the world, particularly in the field of physics (Einstein chasing a beam of light; Newton’s cannonball, etc)" (The Helmsman Texts chapter 4)
• “How we all fall! Slowly and then all at once!” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)
• “The world is a cacophony of noise, and deep underneath the waves is the occasional signal. Only a few penetrate. The world screams in your face, all the time, desperate for your attention and love!! Most of the time we give our attention to the things that scream the loudest.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)

August 2025; 

Published in July 2025 by Titan Books, London

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Fuzzy thinking" by Bart Kosko

This book starts from the premise that things are rarely black and white; often they are shades of grey. Fifty? Therefore the logic that we use should reflect this. We have a logic based on bi-valence: true or false, yes or no, one or zero. Instead, Kosko proposes a multivalent logic in which truth could hold any value between zero and one. He insists that this is not a probabilistic view: he points out that a car parked 70% in one space and 30% in another does not have a 70% chance of being all in one space.

These are important ideas and this is an important book. What lets it down somewhat is the anger that Kosko feels for mathematicians and scientists and indeed anyone who disagrees with him and the insults he hurls at them. He treats maths and science as if they are not only wrong but, worse, run by incompetent charlatans who are well aware of the frauds they are perpetrating on the public. He is also rather too full of himself; he is an immodest messiah. He proposes a number of applications of fuzzy logic that he himself has developed; since this is an introduction to the subject they are not detailed and I would have appreciated a little more explanation here but then I am not a general reader (indeed, I was considering these issues in 1986 when working at Brunel University in Artificial Intelligence but at that time I did not know enough to be able to move forward past the problems). Unfortunately, many of his applications seem to involve digital computers which seem to give the last laugh to the world of bi-valence.

Despite these weaknesses, this book has many really critical ideas which I cannot do justice to in a review meant for a general reader. I shall be studying Fuzzy Thinking more carefully in a second reading. It was certainly an entertaining read and very well written and I am looking forward to understanding more of this field.

March 2015; 285 pages

"Open" by David Price

This immensely readable book starts with the author having a heart attack!

In many ways it follows the 'industry standard'. Price has a vision of the future of education which he wants to share with us. It is an education transformed by the practices which have transformed (part of) the business world since the massive disruption to the ecosystem known as the internet revolution. He outlines this vision by giving examples (mostly from the business world because education hasn't really been transformed yet) in which visionaries have transformed their industries. Many of these examples have been mentioned in similar books: an example is the development of Post-It notes by 3M. Price then distils the lessons to be learned from these examples into general principles: Share, be Open, be Free, and Trust. The major difference between Price's book and others such as 'The World is Flat' is that Price then applies these rules to the world of education.

But this is a cracking good read which uses its evidence base to entertain whilst providing 'eureka moment' insights and making you think. Not bad!

Price begins with a compelling analysis of the post-internet world. The knowledge economy has rather blown up in our faces: more graduates means that the laws of supply and demand have driven the monetary value of knowledge down as evidenced by  freelance auction sites such as elance.com. He looks at 'open' systems such as the Philosophy in Pubs movement and ‘open source learning’.

He indicts formal learning in traditional education settings. He rehearses the dichotomy of transmissive learning versus constructive learning and suggests that apprenticeships and internships offer blends between the didactic and experiential. Bravely, he asserts that: "We should be in no doubt that businesses, schools and colleges that continue with ‘command and control’ as their dominant forms of leadership and intellectual property strategies are facing extinction, possibly within five to ten years." He wants to see collaborative learning as the dominant model in schools: "If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’."

Price seeks a new model for education which he calls the Global Learning Commons whose characteristics are participation, passion, purpose.

The six imperatives of the Global Learning Commons are:

• "Do it yourself [eg Linux, wikipedia]
• Do it now [eg Just in time learning]
• Do it with friends 
• Do unto others
• Do it for fun [eg foldit, a video game which helps scientists work out protein folding in viruses]
• Do it for the world to see" [eg that food blog from the scottish kid]

He considers 'Just in time' learning: "learning is most powerful when the learner acquires a piece of
information to solve an immediate problem.... there’s a reason why you get the airline safety briefing when the engines are running, and you’re buckled-up, and not when you’re booking your ticket."

He has some great one-liners (some are above):

• Over-testing is like "a gardener pulling up a plant by its roots so that he could see how well it was growing. If a love of learning were a human right (and I contend that it should be) our courts would be overflowing with abuse of rights claims from our young." [OK, that was a two-liner.]
• "Learning doesn’t really work as a spectator sport, as any disengaged school kid will confirm."

I have one or two quibbles:

• I would contend that the anti-authority revolution started long before the world wide web, perhaps beginning with the growth of universal state education (even if it is too formal). As Steven Pinker has suggested in The Better Angels of Our Nature, literacy enables people to read and therefore to become exposed to ideas and, especially in novels, to start to see the world through the point of view of someone else. 
• Surely the example of the BRICs in Chapter One emphasise the need to develop a better knowledge economy even though an inevitable consequence is that the monetary value of knowledge will reduce as supply outstrips demand.
• The 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' motto was coined before 1835.

I was a little disappointed that the evidence base was a little narrow and relied heavily on the old favourites such as wikipedia, Google and 3M.

But on the whole this is a brilliantly readable and thought-provoking book. September 2014; 152 pages