Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Certain books are like writing prompts. Like this one. So here we go. Finally I am writing a book review.

It is a book on an unlikely love between two nerds Sadie and Sam. Am pretty sure the Sam character is modelled after the writer Gabrielle Zevin.

What I liked about the book:

1. Gamer/Programmer persona: I like how Zevin got into the mindspace of the gamer protagonists. I felt while reading the book that I was listening to real conversation between engineers. Specifically the retro tech space. I am pretty sure she did a ton of research on it.
2. Character arc of Sam Mazer: I love the psychology of Sam. I loved how Sam grew during the course of the novel. In very small yet telling ways. I liked and empathised with Sam's early wounds and how those early wounds became a defining characteristic and a fundamental character flaw. I love how during the course of the novel (during the course of his life), he slowly moved towards healing those wounds. (I wonder who is the Marx in my life - that near perfect antidote for Sam who heals just through his constant presence and his eventual absence)
3. Creating and maintaining the gentle romantic tension between Sam and Sadie: At the end of the day, this is a book about love. May not be a book on romance. But still love novels get icky for me sometimes. But this book was not icky for me. (I wrote the word icky and checked google if this was a real word. It was. "Distastefully sentimental". Spot on. Moving on.) I love this love between those bunch of engineers. I also love the way, the relationship of Sam and Sadie was left in an open-ended way.
4. Hope in the midst of suffering, pain, foolishness and frailty of life: Parts of the book are dark. Parts of the characters are dark. But i love how there is a constant haunting of hope in every page. I adore the fact how Zevin has appropriated the gloomy words from Macbeth "Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow" into something more hopeful. The endless leases of life in the game character. You can die in a game but you can always restart the level. There is always tomorrow.

Postscript:

The book was a sudden trip back to my coding days. And strangely I felt the need to start coding again. In fact some of my major coding projects were done during college (just like the protagonists who wrote their first runaway success Ichigo during college). I remember my first major game that I was proud of. It was an ambitious Tetris games in DOS. It was a game that I could play and entertain myself. If you keep playing till the scores hit INT_MAX, the game crashes. I left this bug as-is as I thought that this constitutes a primitive Easter Egg. I was stupidly competitive and naive. But I was also good. But it was during those games that I had felt that I could feel the rough edges of a craft. The craft of Coding and computers was in some way forced upon myself. But this was a craft meant for me. I always loved Maths and Logic and this helped me in learning it and exercising the craft. It also fed my fiercely competitive spirit. If not for my classmates who pushed me when they themselves undertook significant projects, I don't think i would have done many of these projects.

I feel too many of us work hard but the work sometimes is not creative. As in it is not a craft. Especially when you move to management, the whole work is about orchestration and less about the actual/final craft. Like what did you actually build with your own hands? Organising meetings and sending minutes don't count. Or maybe they do. I am introspecting my work in Isha where all I did was mid-level management. Maybe there is something creative about creating a team and getting them to work towards one goal and keeping the machine running. Maybe management is also a craft.

Nevertheless, I have an idea for a simple app that I want to start using myself. They say right, that you should be your own first user.

I suddenly remember that I do not have the original Tetris game that I wrote. I wrote it on then-state-of-the-art desktop computer that Jeyamma had brought for me. It was a Pentium with 64 MB RAM and 4 GB hard disk. I would have loved to compile the original code and play it once more till the score hits INT_MAX. Alas, the game (along with several essays that i wrote) is gone in those pre-cloud sands of time.

<Stream of consciousness ends>