Mark Ferguson (1)

Mild spoilers ahead. This is an amazing book. It is one of the most interesting twists on time-travel that I have had the pleasure of reading. The recursive plot and changing storylines were truly fascinating (but relatively easy to follow, even as an audiobook). As a developmental psychologist, I enjoyed considering how one person's life (and the person himself) can turn out differently with different key experiences. I was also fascinated by how the older Henrys' memories would change and show more loved thinking about that aspect of the book. Henry's obsession with music and sound is a powerful theme, and since reading this book, I have begun to pay more attention to the "symphony" of sound that surrounds us at all times. I only wish I had connected more emotionally with the main characters (Henry/Gabe/Val) but wonder if it was because I was so overly intrigued and busy thinking about the time travel and its implications. show less

This was a book that probably should not have worked for me. It's the story of a young man whose descent into mental illness is marked by the appearance of two future selves interrupting his present, and the two friends who try to save him. It's chaotic, and unpredictable, and genre-fluid, and honestly the three main characters were pretty unlikable for a lot of the book. It was also one of the most insightful looks into mental illness, and into being a friend of someone with a mental show more illness, that I've ever read. It's hard to even recommend because it's so unusual, but I honestly couldn't put it down. show less

This novel arrives using the currently fashionable format of alternating chapters between two more or less linked stories. Here the first is a conventional, rather trite, college friends romantic triangle which is leavened by the alternate story, a journey into the world of one of them who suffers delusions where he is bedevilled by his hearing of a disturbing music of the spheres and, more importantly for the plot, alter egos from various periods of his life who keep pressing him to change show more various things which have happened in his past. This sounds innovative, and to a point it is, but this sort of new agey premise involving alternative courses of life triggered by random, seemingly trivial decisions is ground that to me was pretty well-furrowed by a spate of books and films treating it around the turn of the century, and I didn't really want to invest the amount of mental effort that would have been needed to grasp the extremely involuted ideas being thrown around by hallucinations in support of a way of looking at life that I consider fanciful at best, delusional at worst, and for which I have very little buyin; I've never believed that the course of empires is determined by whether I lunch at Elaine's or stick a frozen pizza in the oven. It doesn't help that said alter egos too often take off on an anti-abortion screed; I didn't really get this book to find out what the author thinks about that particular controversy, especially when the intellectual rigor devoted to it is approximately equal to the billboards I see when I drive into town. Of course, the fact that I didn't pay a lot of attention meant that I didn't really understand the conclusion, which is surely my bad, but for me this tome was a waste of time. show less

I tried. I really tried. I got about a third of the way in, then gave up.

I wanted to like this book. I think the basic plot idea is phenomenal. But the writing just dragged, and the characters were boring as fuck.