I Read Blake Crouch’s ‘Dark Matter’.

This book was recommended to me (in this timeline) by my wife who had read it and gave it a full 5-star rating, absolutely in love with it. Often, when something gets a massive push like that, some glowing recommendation, it comes bearing such an insurmountable weight that it’s nearly impossible to enjoy.

However, with this one, the clarity of thought in the structure and direction of this novel was staggering! Especially when it comes to a novel that goes through multiple timelines, multiple identities and one that deals with quantum realities overlaying each other where the timelines can get muddied. This one keeps things sorted brilliantly and doesn’t waste too much time bragging that it understands itself. It hits the nail on the head with just how far I want a novel about Schrodinger’s Cat and all that it implies can handle.

This novel beautifully told the many ways in which love stands side by side with obsession. It touched on something beautiful as well, in that our loves are often constructed not only of the things that we did do and did so properly, but also of all the things that we didn’t. All of the missteps, all of the shortcomings, all of the ways that we disappoint Our People, these are the ways that shape our love as well. This is our timbre, our essence. For better or worse, this is the silhouette that fills their door.

As I read this book, time flew by. The action moved SO quickly, the storylines opened up with absolutely no hesitation. Every page felt important, every event in the book held reason. While I’m used to many of my favorite books having long and flourished texture to make up a majority of their body, this book exemplifies how it isn’t always the poeticism of a book that can make it stand out. If an idea has legs, you can simply focus and write this book, this idea, these characters, this location, with such clarity and design that the book can stand on these legs with precision.

This book has a sense of affirmation as well. There are ways in which you can feel blessed by examining exactly where you are, exactly why you are, every day. The things that we have failed in, the ways that we have disappointed mingle with the ways that we excel and the ways that we achieve and the way that we exist. This is us. This is our identity. And truly there is no other version of ourselves, not even another instance of ourselves who followed the road less traveled.