Recursion

TL;DR

I started liking this book but by the end I had to force myself to finish it. I's so weird, it's starts out okay, gets interesting and then drops to be so boring it was hard to finish it. I did not like this book but the idea and how it tells us the effect it has on people and the world is why I would recommend this book.

My Scoring System

I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:

✓ - Main Story: As with [book:Dark Matter|27833670] the idea is amazing and even though the execution is far better I still didn't like it. But the idea is so great it has to be given credit.

X - Side Stories (if it applies):

✓ - Characters: Halena and Slade are the stars of the show, Barry is uninteresting. A guy who constantly cries at everything, had me rolling my eyes a lot when I was reading his point of view. He's probably the worst character in the book so it's unfortunate that he's one of the main protagonists.

X - Setting/Ambiance: It's just America, even if we are playing with alternate realities nothing impressive happens.

X - Ending: Not an amazing ending but it wasn't terrible. The lead up to it was horrible though.

Extensive Review

A bit better than Dark Matter, while on that book we had an incredible idea that wasn't used properly, here we get an incredible idea that shows us the consequences of using it. The beginning is pretty boring, then we get to the mid section and it's interesting and then towards the end it gets so boring that I couldn't believe I was reading the same book. Let's get off the easy stuff out of the way first.

- Slade and Halena were good characters, I really liked both of them. Always happy to read the chapters with them involved, sadly Slade only appears for about half the book.

- The idea of this book is amazing and how it tells us the effect of these alternate realities is perfect. Nothing bad to say about that just like Dark Matter, Blake Crouch's ideas are amazing. I don't want to spoil anything but if I had to rate this book based solely on the idea it presents it would be a 5/5 stars.

Now to the bad stuff:

- There's a running theme in this book, where people when they get these memories from alternate realities suddenly go crazy and commit suicide. I just can't believe it, I don't believe that you can be okay one day, you suddenly get these memories and a few days later you kill yourself because "you don't know what is real anymore". They all keep asking "is this real?" and I just have to roll my eyes, doesn't anyone in this book know what reality is? Reality is what our brain perceives so you're always in reality.

- Barry as a character is pretty boring, I hate how he constantly cries at everything. Yeah I get it he's been through some very grieving moments but seriously, every chapter with him I was reading he was crying about something.

- Minor thing but I hate when it happens in books. Towards the end of the story someone will tell someone that they can do something, they will have to work hard at it and it will be the hardest thing they will achieve in their life. Literally a few paragraphs later that someone does it first try without any problems or difficuly like it's just another Monday at work.

- At some point this book turns into Minory Report, while the book itself acknowledges it. And it's nowhere near as interesting as the movie.

- Before the ending of the book, the last fifty pages are so boring I couldn't believe I was reading the same book. It's boring because nothing new happens it's just the same thing over and over without any progress bring made. I guess the author's intention was to put us in the helplesness of the characters that they can't escape this loop? Well it was very boring and made it so hard to finish this book.

- Meghan is a piece of shit, she doesn't just commit suicide which is already a coward thing to do she sets a fire on her building killing three other innocent people, great job dumbass (it was an accident but she left her stove on when she knew she would kill herself so it's still her fault). I get that she wasn't a big character in the book but still a garbage character for what she did.

- MASSIVE ENDING SPOILER I don't get the implications of the ending. Slade killed Halena to avoid her finding out what she created. Barry kills Slade so Halena will eventually create the chair again. She has the same driven mindset as Slade so I have no doubt that eventually she will try to kill someone to get them to release DMT and figure out how the memory mapping works. Maybe if Barry tells her what happen in his previous timelines she will stop but I'm not sure...

I wish I could enjoy the book like the rest of people who rated it four/five stars but one of the main characters beeing so boring and a crying constantly, the Minority Report section and the lead up to the ending were so boring it destroyed my enjoyment.

I am not an emotional person and I’m full of emotion after finishing this book. Was a bit of a slower start but once I got sucked in, it was a whirlwind. Literally page turner where I couldn’t stop and needed to see what happened next. Fascinating to think of what is possible in the world as this book really stretches your brain (but not in a hard to follow way). You’ve got humor, you’ve got love, you’ve got emotions and tears. And you’ve just got a bunch of humans all trying to figure out the point of life and how to best live it. Beautiful book.

Solipsism : The novel

A quick, fun read with some interesting concepts and philosophy. The dialogue sounds more like a TedX talk than human conversation and there is way too much plot getting in the way of the story.

I heard there are two types of people. Those who prefer Dark Matter and those who prefer Recursion. I guess I'm in the second camp? But only barely.

As much as I liked Dark Matter I guessed the ending at the beginning and situations they got into were getting more and more ridiculous. But it was a thrill ride until the end even though now that I look back I consider the last third of it the weakest.

On the other hand Recursion was borderline between 3 and 4 stars until the last third where it got crazy and amazing. I guess it shows that if you have strong ending it counts for more than having strong core story and weak ending. The re-readability is also much higher than Dark Matter's as the story is about manipulating time.

First three acts (out of five) were kinda losing me. I also admit I wasn't in the headspace to read about deaths and time manipulation while going through a loss myself. Pacing is slower throughout most of the book which was actually welcomed because the situations MCs got into weren't as ridiculous even when they were mind/reality-bending.

Around 100 pages before the end one of the MCs made the dumbest thing I've read this year only for it to lead to the best scene I've read this year so far. So let's call it even. And the book did not let go from there until the end which solidified the 4 star rating.

There was also no cheating regarding page count with no
...sentences structured...
like...
this.

There are suppose to be some plot holes here. Can anyone tell me what they are? Slade says that he manipulated the timeline at the end to make Helena believe it's impossible to enter dead memory. So the interview with the convict who died was orchestrated by Slade to convince Helena. Which means it's not a plot hole. What else is there?

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

OK I guess I have found my favorite read of 2019?? OMG!

When you think things are crazier/bad enough, it goes BEYOND.
Well, I say the same about Dark Matter but I found that this one is solid from the very start while Dark Matter takes a while to truly get going.
Blake Crouch's writing is just so good.

I think I put this book down for 2 days because I didn't want it to end. Lol

Anyway, Blake Crouch is awesome. Recursion is awesome. Read it.

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.

Decent sci-fi read, not terribly challenging, perhaps a bit overly grim towards the end, but entertaining all round.

After reading The Three Body Problem, I feel like sci-fi might be spoilt for me if it's not rooted deeply in hard science! Though Recursion does stem from a real world MIT experiment (amazingly) it's more akin to the romantic notion of sci-fi (if that's even a thing!).

The book splits pretty cleanly into three phases: 1. setup and drama, 2. sci-fi, time travel, action, 3. world ending disaster and reconciliation.

I felt like the first part was a little underwhelming, wondering where the story was going and what these two characters had to do with each other: Helena and Barry.

Thankfully this is cleanly answered in the second part where some interesting ideas are at play: specifically being able to travel back to a memory and “fork” reality off into a new timeline. Though it's only mentioned briefly, it feels like this a nod to four dimensions.

The last part when the characters decide they have to save the world - though apparently it's just down to one person not only being responsible for the end of the world but also be responsible for stopping it.

The book does its best to tell some fairly horrific tales of how the world would end - though this is very American-centric, but as the characters are based in the states, I'd imagine this is because it's their point of view. The descriptions of skin melting off and sores and blisters and radiation burning and all of that is fairly graphic. I can't decide if it made this part of the story more harrowing or if it just felt grotesque.

There's also large chunks of scenes where the protagonists are such incredible pain (the skin from a handprint peeling off and sticking to the walls) that I wondered how they were supposed to actually perform anything, instead of passing out from internal failure. But still, it's just a story!

Overall, a decent read, not super challenging and explored some “fun” ideas with time travel and the concepts of what reality might be.

Above 4 but not completely 5 because the beginning was a bit slow and I put the book down for a good while, and then binge-read it in the last 3 hours.

The last 100 pages were just hell over and over again, and so mesmerizing and agonizing to read. I loved the story and the execution. The endless iterations, the meetings, trusting someone enough to live through hell over and over again. The relationships in this book were a lot stronger as the plot revolved around them.

This was very different from Dark Matter and I enjoyed it immensely. Realistic science fiction done right.

The Science Fiction part of this story is completely unbelievable. However, suspend your disbelief because it's a well written story.

I don't even know.

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.

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.

First of all, it is a loop, not a recursion. As a programmer, the definitions of the two words are very different. But, if you use “Loop” as the title, it will be not as catchy as “Recursion”, so, that is okay.

It was starting with a very promising unique non-mainstream sci-fi story. A machine that can record and simulate the memory immersively where you can live and enjoy the moment and full sensory stimulation based on your memory. At the same time, there is a new disease called False Memory Syndrom, as the reader, we will try to guess what is the connection between these two phenomena. The story was very promising, until, somehow, it turns out to be another time-traveling story.

To be fair, Recursion still gives a unique non-mainstream time-traveling story. I define mainstream story as repairing the time paradox or multiverse creation (a very meh story). But Recursion, since the main theme is about memory, introduces a unique concept: a Dead Memory, that everybody can remember a timeline before the user goes back to “memory” (time) and changes the history. It gives fear and nightmare to people because from their perspective, they are living two lives and both memories are as real to each other.

There are several other rules, as this concept will give another implication. At first, I need time to adjust the concept as it never appears in another story. However, after you are used to this concept, the story flows as a usual time-traveling story.

I still enjoy the rest of the story, as the actions and the problem-solving are very intriguing. But I think I can't give more than 4 stars, 3.5 is the max.

This book is a magnificent book and I very much suggest reading it

Great concept, generic execution. It simply wasn't for me. It's a good book, I can recommend it to science fiction lovers. 

I don't think I would have enjoyed this book as much if I wasn't reading it with other people. It started off very intense and you jump right into it. That made me interested in reading further. But as the story went on it became very convoluted and it sort of loses its impact. I didn't really care about the story or the characters that much. Especially the whole part on the oil rig. It was just a whole sequence of finding out Slade is a fucking asshole and manipulating Helena out of her own life. 

Then when Barry and Helena meet it's even worse. They sort of skip out on this whole falling-in-love thing. They tell us they are so fucking in love but that just falls out of nowhere. The book doesn't actually describe them falling in love. Which makes me not care about them. 

The whole lifetimes at the end, I also didn't really like. I don't really know why. Maybe because we only see it from Barry's point of view or because it just sort of seemed like pointless intensity. We all know that this isn't the end of the book so we know Helena is going to go back in the machine. So then nothing feels like it's as tense as they want it to be. 

Absolute perfection. I want to read 100 more books just like this. Exactly what I was looking for in a “between Christmas and New Years” novel.

Loved this book. Read it. Fast paced thriller about time travel. Keeps you wanting more. Didn't want it to end, yet couldn't get there fast enough.

Very, very interesting concept but the ending is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge cop out. There's no resolution, no solution to the problem of the novel. Just a ‘what happens next' cliff hanger.

I'm gonna need this to be adapted to film and directed by JJ Abrams.

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.

Lots of timey wimey stuff.

I read Crouch's previous book Dark Matter and ripped through it. The way he writes and the concepts he plays with in his books are so well executed. I then picked up this book from my local library and was so happy to have ready it. A fantastic book just as good as Dark Matter, I highly recommend, especially if you enjoy mind-bending concepts.