Book Notes: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By: Gabrielle Zevin

This book gave me the rare joy of re-experiencing one of my favorite authors from YA days.

🫒 Quotes

• Alice, like their grandmother, had a strong distaste for life’s inevitable gray areas (36).

• The game character, like the self, is contextual. In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin.” In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid.” And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than ever before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was Korean and that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps even a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery (80).

• It was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did (82).

• Despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be? (253).

• Good. That’s what I thought. Mazel.

• Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know– were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because they were growing in his backyard? (266).

🥭 Vocabulary

• echt – true, bona fide, genuine

• Ne plus ultra – “the ultimate” (latin: “not further beyond”)

• cicerone–

  • Marx was the kind of well-traveled cicerone who always knew the best parts of any city (65).

• propitious– providential, favored

  • (re: Glass Flowers) How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Could there have been a more propitious place to begin Unfair Games? (65).

• in medias res– into the middle of a narrative (non-linear) (67)

• trite– overused, lacking originality, cliché

  • I want to make something that will make people happy. That seems trite (70)

• guileless– innocent and without deception (102)

🍸 References

• Marx had them read a book about children and verbal development, The Language Instinct. He wanted the pre-verbal Ichigo to feel authentic.

• William Morris, The Strawberry Thief – innovative textile technique (use of red and yellow in an indigo discharge dyeing technique)

• Nezu Shrine (& azalea gardens) – Shinto tradition, red torii gates

• La Cuesta Encantada, Hearst Castle and its bougainvillea

• Venus of Urbino, Titian

🌁 Questions and Themes

• What makes a book enjoyable? Why did I enjoy this book?

  • Relatability

  • Insightfulness

  • Relatable insights

  • Invested in characters

• What makes Marx such a likable character?

  • Sadie and Sam are mired in their negative beliefs about each other (mostly Sadie towards Sam) but Marx assumes the best in everyone and this makes him generous in spirit, which is a magnetic quality