Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This book is both heartbreaking and joyous; it’s a love letter to computer games and the power of friendship.

Grief and trauma inform the story, but it’s so life-affirming and an absolute must-read for anyone who is a gamer or who has fond memories of playing computer games in their youth. 

This is the only book of the three favourites of 2023 that isn’t horror. It’s another story of friendship and loss, but it is written from a more literary angle.

The main characters are both nerds. Their friendship was based on gaming; it was how they met, stuck in a hospital playing video games together, and how they reconnected after an argument that left both of them battered and bruised. They set up a gaming software company together, a very successful one, until tragedy strikes, but their friendship feels suffocating at times, obsessive and angry.

It spoke volumes to me… show more.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book that felt like it was written for me. And, judging by the accolades, I’m sure there are many other readers who felt like it was written for them. That’s an incredible feat.

It’s a sweeping story of Sam and Sadie who meet as children and bond over video games. They reconnect later as college students. This is a love story, but in the conventional sense. And, it’s one that when you close the back cover, you’ll wish to have more time in these incredible characters’ lives. 

Although I hyped this up after seeing it on many favorites list, I loved this. 

I love building websites. It's something I've been doing since high school and find so much joy in. The characters in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow share a similar passion for building video games. That passion (and occasional obsession) mirrors my own experience creating things online.

With each game Sadie and Sam developed, I thought about the games that inspired them that I also played. Their conversations about naming and creative decisions on what should go into building a game mirrored my own experience working… show more.

I know very few people who didn’t fall for this book. It’s the kind of saga that you can disappear into, with a little something for everyone: turbulent friendship and unrequited love, art-making, video games, ambition, betrayal, and joy.

I love this book for its wildly honest, insightful, and often brutal rendering of art-making and the relationships that sustain a creative life. It spoke to my writerly heart—chartered the messiness of wanting to make things, the hunger and insecurity and pleasure of it.

I’m also a sucker for a novel with an innovative form, and there are a few chapters… show more.

The is a bestseller for a reason. It's a story of friendship, but more importantly it’s a love story as the characters weave their lives together through lots of hardship. The message appeals to me in a big way because I’m all about connections and how we connect in a meaningful way.

In this book, connections are made through a disability and their shared artistic ability. It’s the genuine authentic way in which they navigate through life together that you will appreciate, and that will move you toward a more compassionate and implement it into your own life.

We all… show more.

Three separate people that I trust when it comes to books recommended this to me. Despite all the hype I’d already seen, it still exceeded expectations—a great story with wonderful characters and some interesting moral questions to get to grips with, too.

I felt immersed in an entirely different world, and I was reluctant to leave it. You won’t regret reading this one.

I loved Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow first and foremost because it's a profound meditation on creative collaboration and its unblinking emotional exploration of how coauthorship is strengthened and challenged when your collaborator is also your family. 

It's also a loving critique of the technology industry and a fascinating examination of how the human urge to tell stories is reinvented through the power of networked computing.

What I loved about this book is that it was a love story, but not a romance. It’s so unusual to have the central love story of a book be a platonic friendship.

Sam and Sadie become friends as children, and despite breakups, bad relationships, misunderstandings, and tragedy, their friendship survives.

This is also a novel about computer games, but you don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate it. I think, as with Ready Player One (a favorite of mine), it helps to be a particular age so that you can remember early computer games, but I was drawn… show more.

Gabrielle Zevin creates such vivid characters with so much depth that I felt as if I knew them.

I grew up playing the same video games they reference; I’ve experienced some of the same anxieties; and I’ve worked through grief with the same halting uncertainty—as if life can’t and shouldn’t continue normally in the wake of profound loss. By the end of the book, I felt a rare connection with these characters—one that only a supremely talented author can create.

This is a novel I’ve thought about over and over, and I can’t wait to pick it back up and… show more.