Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I can't remember the last book I picked up and never let go in the end. It's probably a fantasy book.

As a habit and a ritual, when I pass by airports for long flights I almost always buy a book. Often a book written by a nationality of that location, or a book about the location itself. This is how I got into Bali short stories when we were there in 2023, or how I read that Fractured India history book I picked up passing through New Delhi on my many flights there.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow (written by Gabrielle Zevin) is neither written by an Australian (or Filipino), nor was it especially about anything related to the location or the trip itself. But rather, I picked it up out of banality—seeing the hyperbolic John Green quote of "One of the best books I've ever read," and my own ego and deep-seated contrarianism of wanting to prove John Green wrong.

I'm typing this halfway through my flight from Australia, a good four hours over—and I'm done with the book. Surprising myself more than anyone else.

TTT is a story of two lives from high school to their thirties. That may sound a bit trite and tired, similar to how One Day was a story of two lives as well, intertwined. But to me, what made the book interesting is that while it's set in Boston, San Francisco, thousands of miles away from Manila where I grew up, I read it and it feels like it's partly a story of my life.

See—the book is primarily a story of a life of gamers, building games. Specifically, millennial gamers who grew up with Oregon Trail as their first games, graduated to play Donkey Kong, and eventually took on better games like Kentucky Route Zero, Bioshock 2, and other classics. These anecdotes and tidbits about games are interspersed in the march of life of its two protagonists—the decidedly not manic pixie dream girl Sadie, and the not really Holden Caufield from the meadow style, Sam.

It's a story of Sam and Sadie, from the moment they met to their eventual middle years, and everything in between. It's a story of games, and designing games, and the intricate partnership there has to be to build games. It's a story of life, love—but mostly it's a story of friendship.

I am not in the habit of describing books or reviewing them in a way where I have to get into the characters specifically. And I won't start here. But the power of the book is more around the realness of the relationship, and how loss, friendship, and love form much of our heartbeats in life. It feels that every point is earned, and every high and low was decidedly earned through quips and smalls. The storytelling was brisk, the pace was fast. And it was such an easy read that it's a bit sad to think I ended it pretty fast.

It feels like a John Green book—which is why John Green probably liked it—but at the same time, it's decidedly not. It's a lot less depressing, and in a way, less serious, but it's also more focused on the themes it wants to explore, and it did it in a way where it wasn't too stationary or too lingering on the topics.

Finally, I feel like the biggest reason why I adored this book is that I am a gamer myself, and I grew up with these games they talked about. I understand the type of games that they were building, from the artsy-artsy Solution and Revel, to the Mapletown clone, even to the MMORPG Pioneer. To use gaming as a medium was an easy way to get to my heartstrings. It's not just nostalgia—it's recognition. The way they describe the creative process, the partnership tensions, the compromises between art and commerce—these are conversations I've had, arguments I've witnessed.

I'm sure I'll forget about this book soon, but I appreciated the few hours it took me to devour the 496 or so pages it was, and I appreciated living in the world of Sam and Sadie and Marx (their business partner and best friend), and being part of building games along with them, and watching them grow up and eventually face life as adults.