Recursion

WHEN WILL I GET MY BARRY TO MY HELENA??????

My brain wants to give this four stars and my heart wants to give it three stars. Or is it the other way around? I'm not sure. I'm going to be nice because I loved Dark Matter and am inclined to view the problems in a more favorable light towards Mr. Crouch and the no doubt intense amount of work writing this book must have been.

Here's the thing with time travel stories. They can be amazing, they can be outright trash, and they can be everything in between. I love time travel. But there are different styles of time travel stories. There are “multiple timelines”, there are “everything in the past already happened, you always went to the past and can't change anything”, and there is “when you change stuff, everything in the present is different in ways you can't predict.” I like each of these styles, and they can each explore different themes and questions.

Minor spoilers going forward. Nothing too spoilery.

This book is a unique (from my experience) combination of 1 and 3. And the first half of this book is electrifying. The second half I had increasing problems with. It is very repetitive, but this isn't my big problem. My big problem is that Crouch is so interested in his ideas and exploring memory (all super cool, the ideas are definitely the highlight of this book) that he doesn't stop to think through plot holes and logic gaps and just like, how choices work.

Here is a minor example- the main character's entire motivation is to help Alzheimer's patients because her mom has it. Every single thing in this book steps from her wanting to get her mom healthy. And in every time traveling adventure, her mom gets Alzheimer's. This woman is a scientist and obviously has access to research. Yet in no iteration does she try to intervene in her mom's life to prevent her from getting Alzheimer's. It's possible she would get it anyway, but we know lots of risk factors for Alzheimer's- diet, sleep, exercise. This is literally not even mentioned as something worth trying. I could not get past this!! If I had decades of foreknowledge that my mom was for sure going to get Alzheimer's in year X, I would be intervening constantly. Buying brain foods, forcing my mom to go on walks with me, etc. Maybe she still gets Alzheimer's, but maybe I totally stop this from happening. HOW IS THIS NOT EVEN BROUGHT UP?!? I can't believe it. Does Blake Crouch just not know you can take preventative measures for Alzheimer's?

One other example I have to be more vague about due to spoilers is, there is a particular nation's government response that is very negative, and it causes lots of problems for the main characters and also the world. And these governments keep making the same mistakes, over and over again, despite each time having more access to more information. Maybe my brain puts problems together differently, but I don't believe this problem would keep arising. I can't be more specific, but it is such a plot-centric problem and I was just hating having to read it over and over because it felt like Crouch was saying “I need X to happen”, and disregarding how people would act in the situation.

The very end is fine. As I write this review, I probably should have given it three stars. But the concept is so interesting! This book is so readable! I read it in less than a day. The characters are good! It really makes you think! I love books about memory! It's just...such a crash and burn in that second half.

O livro que vai de 0 a 100 em pouquíssimas linhas. Que te dá um nó e em seguida te explica tudo. Um livro bem técnico, mas ao mesmo tempo simples e por vezes até didático. Recursão foi uma leitura muito muito boa, que me tirou de uma ressaca literária de 1 ano.
Os personagens são vivos, a história é complexa e você não percebe a complexidade até a metade do livro.
O final foi um pouco repetitivo demais, mas foi tão divertido de ler que isso pode ser completamente relevado.
Meu primeiro livro do Blake Crouch e irei atrás de matéria escura em breve. Que aula de literatura.

4.5 * This was an awesome story and fun writing style! Time travelling Primer style (the indie movie). Smart plot with strong characters and the author was not afraid to abandon them from time to time. I really enjoyed how the story was rolling out and the care for details. I think its probably the first scifi of this kind o read and it was really enjoyable and pretty smart. The minus is for two minor issues:
spoiler alert
The so-called original timeline couldn't be original, as the protagonist already was encountering cases of false memory syndrome in it at the beginning of the book
Really the fact that they were caught twice doing the same thing going for a hike on the convergence day was silly and some kind of author's nostalgia of a sort.

Sci-fi thriller in which time, memory, the nature of reality, and perception are explored. There's a theme of not dwelling in the past, appreciating your memories and looking ahead. The ideas were fascinating and the action had me on the edge of my seat.

While I did enjoy the romance between two main characters, this is mostly a concept-driven story. The characters did not have defined personalities and the dialogue wasn't great, not interesting or believable.

Overall, this was a memorable novel that I'll be thinking about for a while.

This was a brilliant work of science-fiction. I've been totally engulfed into the story, between Helena and Barry and their race to save the world of a terrible invention. But also deeply questioned about the nature of our memories, sense, and apprehension of time and its complexity. This was really well written and I must admit that I had a big problem letting go off the book for the last half !

Rather original when it comes to time travel (at least one aspect of it). I would've preferred fewer iterations of the same experience and same outcome, but that's just me.

I struggled with the audio book and switched to the print, and I'm so glad I did. Incredible story. Straight to my favourites. I'll be thinking about this one for a while. It felt a tiny bit repetitive (recursive, you might say) towards the end, but the characters had it worse!

-3.5-

Yo no soy de libros policíacos ni thrillers, pero creo que estos thrillers futuristas sí son lo mío. Los principales personajes Barry un detective que de repente se enfrenta a un caso, que cada vez se esta viendo más en la ciudad, que es personas que aseguran tener vívidos recuerdos de otra vida diferente a la actual y Helena quien al intentar crear una máquina para curar el Alzheimer, lo que termina creando es una maquina que podría cambiar el mundo, sobre todo en malas manos.

La idea me parece interesante, pero el último tercio del libro me dio un poco de ansiedad. Y Helena, pobre mujer.

Liked. Very hard to review without spoiling, but an interesting take on a familiar concept. Light on character exploration, but the plot goes places.

Wow. I loved this book! The sheer expansion of the storyline, it's actually telescopic as it moves from this jarringly narrow focus to literal apocalypse. So, so awesome.

Thanks for the recommendation, Marci!

Crikey! What a great read. I had a few too many mindblown moments while reading this book. I've always been intrigued by time travel sci-fi's, but Blake takes it to a whole another level by tying it with memory manipulation.
I was just a bit disappointed with the missing scientific explanations of the time travel, but Blake's movie-like storytelling and his ability to paint the different timelines for us makes this book a gripping read.

Estava super curiosa para ler esse livro, depois de Matéria escura. Recursão tem muita confusão e vai e vem (literal e figurativamente falando), muita tristeza, um pouco de amor e esperança. A receita rende pelo menos uma lida em uma sentada, mesmo que não se torne um favorito.

Wow. Crouch hat nun nach “Dark Matter” mir “Recursion” ein weiteres mal mein Hirn zum schmelzen gebracht. Er schafft es immer wieder dass man das Buch zur Seite legt und denkt: “Hab ich das gerade wirklich gelesen? Ist dies wirklich passiert?”
Mehr bitte.

A great, fast paced, engrossing read! Get ready to have your mind blown again, if you've read Blake's other book Dark Matter!

This is one of the greatest thrillers I've ever read. My emotions got the best of me. This book made me appreciate what I have and what is to come for my family.

The only thing that upsets me with this book is how I can't rate it 6 stars.

Blake Crouch takes my understanding of reality and crumbles it in the palm of his hand. After reading Dark Matter, I knew I had to read this book. I don't know how anyone could develop such a complex storyline and execute it so successfully but my mind is blown after finishing Recursion. Sure, some parts are a little slow, but most of this book is so mind bending and trippy that it completely makes up for those parts. It reminds me a lot of the Netflix series Dark, which also plays with time but in a diff

I just gobbled this book up, read it over two nights, staying up much later than i should have. I thought the book was a lot better than Dark Matter. I wasn't a huge fan of the last few chapters of ending, but overall a fan of it.

Love the idea of sending someone's consciousness back into a memory, dead memories, rewriting timelines, etc. Characters were interesting. Would've liked more Slade. It got a little wound up toward the end.

Solipsism : The novel

........... holy shit
Yet another absolute mindfuck of a masterpiece from Blake Crouch. Don't think I've ever gone through a book this fast and now I don't think I can stop thinking about this for days.

Wonderful.

Pop-sci-fi. Dan Brown meets HG Wells and introduces him to Tequila. The next morning, massively hungover, they halfassedly write a book before going for breakfast and sobering up. Unfortunately before they get back and toss the draft in the trash, Blake Crouch finds and publishes it.

Very easy reading, burned through it in a week. A very nothingy book though. What even happened?!? Not “what even happened” as in “stuff happened that blew my mind beyond comprehension” but just “did anything actually really happen in this book?” Sure lots happened, but all in a very throwaway manner, that didn't really seem to matter.

There is no characterisation at all. If you sit down for a coffee one day with Barry, what's he like? You can't answer, because you don't know.

Oh and there's a totally freakin' weird Hitler justification casually thrown in the middle for no real reason: “Who's to say the actions of a monster like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot didn't prevent the rise of a much greater monster? ... Without Hitler, an entire generation of immigrants would never have come to the USA” - err ok, I can't even begin to deal with that take but it rEALly mAKeS YoU THinK.

So much of what the characters do and how they behave doesn't make sense, not because it's philosophically difficult but because it's just not how real people act.

It's not a bad book though. The writing is decent - reminiscent of Dan Brown in the “you're reading a movie” feeling but it's not awful by any stretch. The idea behind it is good, it's just... it doesn't really go anywhere. As the book itself says “This is just first-year philosophy shit”.

Yes. Yes it is.

If you woke up tomorrow and suddenly had a brain full of memories of a life you, until this moment, have no recollection of living — what would you do? When memories become so fragile and ephemeral, how do you know what is actually real? Blake Crouch examines a space-time crisis of human making with such a pure and focused vision. The story reminds me most of the movie Edge Of Tomorrow, which is based on concepts in the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Only, in Crouch's book, the stakes feel more personal and thus, carry more emotional weight. It's a wonderful, if sometimes mind bending sci-if story.

Adult sci-fi doesn't tend to be my thing, but I enjoyed this more than I was expecting to. With enough suspended disbelief, especially in how the story resolves, I was compelled to keep reading until the end. The story was twisty and interesting, with each part (6 in all) revealing another telescoping layer of the world he's built. My students that have read it said they were confused, so I'm not sure I'd recommend it for YA, but I don't think I'll forget this book.