Middlegame

If you could rewind back to a certain point in your life and make a different decision, would you? That's not really a question in this book - the main characters can do this and they do it over and over. They keep dying, the world keeps ending, and they keep going back to some key moment to choose differently in the hopes of getting a better outcome. It proves to be a tricky balance. You have to accept certain formative experiences, no matter how painful they are, in order to become the kind of person who can save the world. Happiness doesn't exactly lead to strength.

Still. If you could take something back, would you? I'd like to know what would have happened if Kevin hadn't gotten the bone marrow transplant. Would the cancer have come back? Would chemo have worked a second time? Would we have decided to go through with it anyway, and just delay this outcome a few years? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? What if the doctors caught the GVHD sooner? He never spiked a fever, which is the key symptom, so it took them a long time to diagnose. Would the steroids have worked if he'd been able to take them sooner? Or was this all just set in stone from the moment he got his leukemia diagnosis.

I'll never know the answer to these questions, so asking them is only ever painful. And besides, this book comes around to the other half of that question: if you could re-write history, how would you know when to stop? Life's never perfect, but when is it good enough?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more