a tale (book review) told by an idiot

or, my thoughts on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I’d love to be more regular with The Lit List, and even though that probably won’t happen because I am who I am, I’m going to test posting a few of my book reviews here in addition to instagram. I prioritize my thoughts and discussions there and it would be nice to ramble outside the constraints of an instagram caption that comes secondary to the picture anyway. It’s very likely there will be too much overlap and people won’t want to read this twice, but considering I do all of this for entertainment and boredom-curing anyway, who cares!

Hokusai, Katsushika. “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura),” also known as “The Great Wave.” 1831.

It feels only right to start with a book I recently finished that hasn’t left my mind since: Tomorrow, and Tommorow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

Something kept me from giving this book five stars, which is great evidence for why star rating systems are so flawed. It’s all personal preference, of course: dialogue, characters, sensitivities. This is still going to be one of my favorite books of the year, and it was already everyone’s favorite last year.

I have pretty “standard” taste in books; I’m not likely to have controversial opinions or even opposing ones to the norm. But it is quite rare that I love a book as popular as this one because some of the commercialized aspects get in the way of the experience for me. I mean that in the least pretentious way possible. Tomorrow x3 just nestled itself into a soft spot.

In 11th grade AP English, the teacher who pushed me to be an English major had the class memorize Macbeth’s “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech for extra credit during our unit on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (which is where the “sound & fury” of my instagram bio came from). 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I was nervous, claimed a fear of public speaking to get out of it. But really, the verse just made me cry. I was 16, and Faulkner was the best damn thing I’d ever read (lol), and suddenly someone as far removed from my life as Shakespeare gave me words that felt too personal to speak out loud to others, even though they didn’t belong to me.

That’s what words do for us: they make all the universal shit personal and the personal universal. Good writing gives us a precipice to fall over or come back from, which is to say it meets you where you are.

Life is short except when it’s long, meaningless except for when it has meaning, hard except when it’s easy. And life certainly doesn’t exist as a binary — except for when it does. Except for when our brains get stuck on the what ifs, the sliding doors, the other worlds. And this is part of why we read and watch movies and play video games, right? Different worlds, endless lives.

But we don’t have different worlds and endless lives in reality; we have this one finite life that is both in and out of our control, a series of obstacles and levels and chapters that don’t follow a linear narrative. There is no narrative. Life is not a book, or a movie, or a video game. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And yet, the nothingness is where the raw juicy pulp, the marrow of life, is. It’s where we are, for better or worse.

I’ve read the Macbeth speech a thousand times in the last 15 years, but reading it at the end of this book — reading this book, full stop — made me feel like I did back then: standing with shaky hands in front of a room of people whose approval I desperately wanted, feeling the rush of the simultaneous relief and terror of being seen and perceived, unsure if what comes out of my mouth will be a barbaric yawp or a sob.

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I enjoyed The Washington Post’s review’s very cute accompanying illustration. And once I finish a book, I love to look up interviews with the writer or anything about the book in their own words, so here’s an interview with Polygon. Wired’s review has a quote that summed up perfectly why I thought this novel, about video games of all things, was so universally special:

Whether it’s musical theater, death metal, or comics, every nerd has had a similar moment of connection—when you realize that out of all the faceless rabble that populates this huge, heartless world, here is someone who loves the same thing you do. Connecting is hard, but not this time. You have something to talk about.

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I was delighted to discover that the publisher (presumably, at least) has a corresponding Spotify playlist. This is one of my favorite aspects of Spotify! There are fan-made playlists for nearly every book I’ve read, and I’ve made them before too.

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And if you, like me, feel a pull of unbearable nostalgia about your childhood video games, please talk to me about those too. And current ones you love too! As I recently told my friend Sarah, who is quite good at video games, “I’m bad a games where I have to do something.”

Thanks for being here and thanks for reading and thanks for indulging me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Tx3 if you’ve read it, even if you disagree with me, even if you hated it! Let’s fight!