Replay

Genre: Fantasy

Book Type: Physical

Author: Ken Grimwood

Narrator: William Dufris

Pages / Length: 320 pages / 11 hours and 26 minutes

Publisher: WIlliam Morrow (July 22, 1998) / Tantor Audio

Book Description:

Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: "What if you could live your life over again?"

Thoughts:

While this book is a good reminder to live your life for tomorrow, and to keep moving forward, it fell short and felt like it was missing another part to the book. There was a lot left unanswered (apparently the author was working on a sequel but passed away before it was completed - I'm not sure if that would have helped or not). The concept of the book had a lot of potential, but I'm still not sure what I read. This was like reading the movie Groundhog Day, as it was very repetitive - which I understood because of when Jeff would restart his life, but it just didn't do it for me... Bummer.

Favorite Quotes:

⌛️ All the hopes he had of rebuilding his life with the advantage of foreknowledge... were they doomed to be more superficial changes, quantitative but not qualitative? Would his attempts at achieving genuine happiness be as inexplicably thwarted as his intervention in the Kennedy affair? (Page 65)

⏳ ... "Sometimes I think our experience is what they were really talking about: not reincarnation over a linear time scale, but little chunks of the entire world's history occasionally repeated over and over again... until we realize what's happening and are able to restore the normal flow."

"But we have been aware of it, and it keeps on happening."

"Maybe it continues until everyone has the knowledge," she said quietly.

"I don't think so; we both knew immediately, and it seems you either recognize it or you don't. Everybody else just keeps going through the same patterns."

"Except the people whose lives we touch. We can introduce change." (Page 137)

⌛️ "I wonder about it constantly. But I'm no longer consumed by that quest for answered, haven't been for a long time. Our dilemma, extraordinary though it is, is essentially no different than that faced by everyone who's ever walked this earth: We're here, and we don't know why. We can philosophize all we want, pursue the key to that secret along a thousand different paths, and we'll never be any closer to unlocking it.

"We've been granted an incomparable gift, Pamela; a gift of life, of awareness and potential greater than than anyone has every known before. Why can't we just accept it for what it is?"

"Someone - Plato, I think - once said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.'"

"True. But a life too closely scrutinized will lead to madness, if not suicide."

She looked down at their footprints in the othereise - pristine snow. "Or simply failure," she said quietly.

[...]

"All life includes loss. It's taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don't expect I'll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn't mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it." (Pages 158-159)

⏳ The unfathomable cycle in which he and Pamela had been caught had proved to be a form of confinement, not release. They had let themselves be trapped in the deceptive luxury of focusing always on future options; just as Lydia Randall, in the blind hopefulness of her youth, had assumed life's choices would forever be available to her. "We have so much time," Jeff heard her say, and then his own repeated words to Pamela echoed anew in his brain: "Next time... next time."

Now everything was different. This wasn't "next time," and there would be no more of that; there was only this time, this sole finite time of whose direction and outcome Jeff knew absolutely nothing. He would not waste, or take for granted, a single moment of it. (pages 309 - 310)

Rating: ⭐️⭐️