Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

I usually don’t read fiction. One of the hosts of a podcast I recently started listening to shortly mentioned this book in passing, saying that it’s really good. I wasn’t looking for it, but I came across it at the bookstore the other day, so I bought it.

Surprisingly, I plowed through the 400 pages in a week. Turns out, if you replace hours of watching Youtube with reading, you can finish whole books quite quickly. Who would have thought.

The story is ok. I liked that it references a lot of gaming and pop culture of my generation, given the author is roughly my age. The book, especially at the beginning, gave me many flashbacks to my college years, especially the Building Virtual Worlds class taught by Randy Pausch. The characters are relatable (for me):

Sadie […] wondered if this was what other twenty-three-year-olds’ Friday nights were like. When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn’t had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn’t enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn’t eager to leave. She hated being drunk […]. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. […] She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place.

What I did not like were the numerous stereotypes about student life, software development and the gaming industry. For example:

With a major assist from Dov’s Ulysses engine, Sadie and Sam had programmed Ichigo, nonstop, until their fingers bled. Literally, in Sam’s case. His fingertips grew so dry and blistered that he had to put Band-Aids on them to stop blood from getting on his keyboard. But when the Band-Aids slowed down his typing, he removed them.