Recursion

Around the world, people have begun falling victim to a new, unexplained phenomenon which manifests as a sudden recall of false memories so disturbing that many sufferers ultimately commit suicide. Barry, a police investigator, becomes personally embroiled in the mystery when during his probing discovers that False Memory Syndrome is actually a lab-manufactured affliction. Captured by the architects of FMS, he is sent back to the night of his daughter's tragic death, where (when?) he is given an opportunity to change history.

A delightful, super-entertaining thriller — not what I typically read, but it proved to be the sort of book I'm reluctant to put down even when it's time to go to bed or feed myself. The challenge of tracking show more multiple timelines had me periodically scratching my head, and Crouch kept me guessing about how the story could possibly resolve satisfactorily. It does...I think...though the nuclear bomb scenes gave me actual nightmares (a first). show less

After finishing Recursion, my first thought was that Blake Crouch likes a good mindf*ck because that is what Recursion is. His previous novel, Dark Matter was confusing but at least I understood the science behind the story. Plus, I wasn’t confused for very long. I cannot say that about his latest one though. Every twist added a layer of complexity to the story so that by the time you finally got around to the ending, the story is too convoluted for rational thought. You are just there for the ride with no control of the reins.

The thing is that you don’t realize this at the time of reading it. It is only when you finish the story and think back over everything you read when you finally question what exactly happened. The more you show more think about it, the more you recognize the confusion until you can do nothing but question what exactly you read. Prior to that point, the story seems not just reasonable but thrilling and fast-paced. You don’t get the chance to sit and reflect on the action because Mr. Crouch doesn’t afford you the opportunity, keeping you and his characters at a frantic pace of discovery, action, and reaction, and you are perfectly fine with this while reading it. After your adrenaline levels drop and common sense once again reigns supreme in your brain, you begin to feel as if Mr. Crouch duped you into thinking his story has more substance and merit than it may actually have. The problem is that you have to wade through layer upon layer of plot twists in order to figure out what the basic plot is before you can determine if that feeling of duplicity towards Mr. Crouch is an accurate assessment. For my own part, I had no desire to wade through all that. I can’t say Recursion makes a lot of sense when viewing it in the light of day, but it certainly is a wacky ride while you are on it. show less

This book really engaged me. Of course, any book that involves Alzheimer's Disease is going to get my attention and when you throw in a female scientist and a type of time travel it hits a bunch of my favourite subjects. I listened to this book which had excellent narrators and a great production.

Barry Sutton is a New York City police detective. One day in 2018 he is called to a skyscraper where a woman is threatening to jump to her death. Barry tries to talk her out of it, mentioning his own personal tragedy in which his daughter was killed by a hit and run driver and how devastated he was but managed to carry on. The woman tells Barry she is remembering the memories of another woman who jumped to her death from this same building and show more she just can't take the memories anymore. There have been a few reports of people experiencing similar stranger memories. It is common enough that it is referred to as False Memory Syndrome. Then the woman jumps.The book then jumps to 2007 when Helena Smith who has been working on a way to restore memories to people like her mother who have Alzheimer's Disease. Her funding is almost at an end when she is approached by a representative of billionaire Marcus Slade. She is offered unlimited funds for her research and any other resource she needs. How can she turn that down? The book goes back and forth between the two times and the two characters with Barry looking into the claims of False Memory Syndrome and Helena working on a decommissioned oil rig in the ocean with Marcus Slade. Her research takes an abrupt turn when Slade insists that the memories captured by Helena's apparatus be reinstalled in a person who has medically died while in a flotation chamber. Since Slade funds everything Helena goes along with this plan and it works in that the clinically dead person revives when their recorded memory is installed in their brain. What is actually occurring is that the dead person is being sent back in time to when the memory they recorded took place.and living their life over from that point. When Helena realizes the ramifications of this time travel she is determined to stop Slade. She and Barry team up and try to find a way to defeat Slade. In fact, they try to do it over and over again.

It's a fascinating idea for a book and I enjoyed it a lot. There are a few issues that either I am too dense to understand or Blake Crouch didn't do a good job of resolving them (e.g. I never did figure out how the woman that jumped off the building starting Barry's investigation ended up with another woman's memory because later it was only a person's own memories that they retrieved). So, I couldn't completely accept the premise of the book but it was still captivating. show less

I was one of many who read and loved Dark Matter and so I went into this one with high hopes. For me, it did not disappoint. The premise is that people around the world are experiencing False Memory Syndrome (FMS) and no one knows the cause or cure. They are hit with a wave of “dead” memories in black and white of alternate lives.

Barry Sutton is an NYC cop grieving the death of his daughter and breakup of his marriage. Helena is a brilliant scientist who is whisked off to a remote oil rig by billionaire Marcus Slade for a secret project. As the story unfolds there are so many complications and unexpected jaunts that at times I felt like my brain was melting. I loved the twists and the fact that despite being very plot driven, I show more still cared deeply about the characters and their relationships.

Though the story is clearly focused on the crazy world of FMS, it also offers quiet meditations on grief, power, love, and more. I loved it and I know that I’ll reread it with a whole new perspective next time.

“And it hits him all over again – the ruinous power of grief.”

“She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”

“Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”

“That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.” show less

Reread in 2021 on audio. Just as beautiful, and a lot less complicated than I remembered it.

"I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life no matter how many timelines I live. That's why I found you in the first place."
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Update: I have tried to tell people on two different occasions that this book is by Barty Crouch. Sigh.

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THIS BOOK. This is my second favourite book read in 2019 so far (my first favourite is a topic to come in 2020, so we'll deal with that then.) But this book! THIS BOOK! Ohmygosh. I read the description and was highly intrigued but I didn't expect it to warp my brain quite so much. My brain is a different being having read this book.

I have never been more glad of train delays. Normally my show more morning commute is seamless, but thankfully, today I ended up stuck in a tunnel which is good because otherwise I would have been sitting at work finishing this because it was so very readable and so mind boggling and so curious. I have an issue with tending to completely race through books, but with this one, I had to pause and think, because Crouch brought in so many topics for contemplation. But I also had to finish it as it was gorgeously pacy.

There is a subtle love story (my favourite kind), and there is a lot of maturity in the discussion of what makes a couple work and what makes them drift apart, and whether that's a bad thing (spoiler alert: it's not.) I appreciated the relationships in this book so much. The nuances of the parent child relationships especially were incredibly touching and powerful. I just want to take the big relationship here and squeeze them a bit and cry with them and love with them. "You look like someone who might want to buy me a drink." "My soul knows your soul. In any time." My heart. I forgot I had one.

And Helena! Helena! Helena, my love, how you evolved! Once you've lived a certain amount of years, you're significantly different to who you once were, and this book does such a great job of capturing that sentiment and exploring it--how you're the same, but different.

THIS ENTIRE CONCEPT. And the title. Oh, how I love the title (hello I was a computer science minor and data structures was one of my favourite college classes and recursion is endlessly fascinating.) The title actually helped me to comprehend what was happening, and though I will never fully understand, the author did such a good job of explaining it in a way that was just detailed enough to be believable. To the extent that I was indeed questioning the space-time continuum as I sat on that train this morning, as I sat at a show last night, as I pretended to pay attention to the nice pair conversing with me. Was that conversation really happening? Would I remember it enough to have 120 synapses fire? What aspects was I paying attention to? So many thoughts that this provoked.

And the ending worked. Endings never work in books like this, but this wasn't too shabby. It made sense, and while I want to know more nuances of what happened as an epilogue to the epilogue (how annoyed I was to read the word "epilogue"!) logically it made sense following the timeline that had already happened. And when I figured out, slightly earlier, how it was going to happen, man. Oh man. That just changed everything, too.

I hadn't realised until before writing this review that Crouch also wrote DARK MATTER which I wasn't actually a super big fan of, but I did adore the concept, so now I'm so terribly excited to see what world he dreams up next. And maybe dive into backlist. Once I get through this pile of library books. (Ha!)

So excited to tell everyone I know about this book (though I'm going to have to refine my pitch a bit here before I become known as the crazy memory girl.) show less

This book reminded me so much of the movie Edge of Tomorrow -- which is one of my favourite films of all time -- right up to the ending, which mirrors the ending of the movie in every way.

I love Crouch's writing (I've repeatedly recommended Dark Matter to anyone who'll listen), and Recursion is written in his usual fast-paced, cinematic style. However, I found the plot a little heavy-handed and the pacing hard to follow at times. I never quite connected with either of the main characters and by the end, they still felt somewhat stilted and superficial. I did find the final third a bit tedious and quite repetitive (necessarily so, I admit, but still). Yet I was very impressed with the science in this book and the amount of research that show more must have gone into it.

Ultimately, though, I was fascinated by the main theme of this novel, which asks the question: "What would you do if you could re-do the past, and take roads you didn't travel?" And, of course, I was entirely sucked in by Crouch's writing, which is unapologetically snappy and fast-paced. show less

"We shouldn't have that power."

Wow, what a dark, twisty little sci-fi story. A true test of someone - their memories. They help mold and shape us - our experiences. But what if we could change that. And what if one change for someone actually changed it for many, and you then HAD both memories, one dark and grayed.

This one definitely asked the tough questions and pushed some great moral buttons. Is it right to play with time - past and present - if you can "save" someone. Who's to say that one thing you changed didn't kick off something worse.

This one is hard to read at times, the twists and turns can leave you reeling a bit as you struggle to wrap your brain around the when and who and...wait, which one is this? but it's a great show more adventure, a very unique and interesting story. I Loved it. show less