Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Recommended by Sean Kelly, Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy, FAS

Zevin ’00 draws on her intimate knowledge of the Harvard/MIT/Cambridge world to tell a great story about two friends — students at Harvard and MIT, respectively — who become wildly successful game designers. The novel begins with their young ambitions and follows them throughout the various challenges of life, allowing readers to witness the characters as they navigate romance, friendship, and grief. In addition to the colorful details about the University, it offers an appreciation for the artistry of video game design and the broadened sense of storytelling that video games evoke.

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Recommended by Trisha Pasricha, gastroenterologist and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School

The novel’s title, taken from the famous “Macbeth” soliloquy, invokes a lyricism and longing that you may not think befits a story about three video game programmers in the 1990s. But the unexpected charm of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is pure poetry.

The parallels between the virtual world the main characters create and the real world they inhabit are at times at odds with one another. Their virtual world presents endless second chances — the promise, always, of another tomorrow — while the real world is vulnerable to the permanence of our actions. It’s when these worlds spill into one another that the novel truly soars — a description of dying reads as a fantastical cutscene; a poignant quest for redemption transcends the idea of “playing the long game.” In those moments, as someone who spent so much of my own childhood immersed in the comforts and delights of video games, I felt seen.

Did I mention the protagonist is an undergraduate at Harvard? There’s even a meet-cute on the Red Line.