The Many Iterations of Harry August

At the start of the year as a way of being a bit more social I joined a book club that was being formed on the Brisbane subreddit. It's been good experience and it has got me reading more than I have in recent years and reading some things I wouldn't normally have given a go. There's usually some good discussion and the meetings are held at a pub on the night they do cheap steaks so there's good food as well. This month I'm not going to be able to make the meeting due to working a night shift so I'm putting down some thoughts on this month's book (I've kind of wanted to do it for each book, but haven't gotten around to it).

 This month's book was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It was a refreshing change from the previous two months which were both rather heavy (physically and metaphorically) tomes. It is a sci-fi novel about a man who lives his life over and over again, and focuses on how he deals with a problem that affects him and his fellow Groundhog Day-ers.

The story takes a while to develop, and starts out with exploring what life looks like for someone who experiences life like this. This is a bit of a mix, and it was at this point I started trying to work out how this works in universe. Like the titular character, I take a multiversal view of how things work (the alternative being a single universe that doesn't work with how things are described). Initially I assumed that the rebirths happen straight away as there is zero perceived time between death and rebirth (although it does take a few years before memories start coming back). However I started considering how this would work with people who had short lives compared to someone who lived a longer life and this just led to paradox or complex schemes with variable speed time. In the end my working model is that upon death the GroundHog Day-ers go into a sort of limbo until the end of the current universe, then they all move to the next universe and remain in limbo until it is time for them to be born again. 

The plot resolution does build on the early set up, but also feels a bit deus ex machina.

Normally I've taken some notes of the books to record some bits that have particularly stood out for me in the previous books, but this time my notes have mostly been keeping track of Harry's various lives (they aren't presented entirely in order) and the ongoing work to have a proper model of how the Groundhog Dayism works. Also, this wasn't as literary a tome as the last two books, so the crafting of the language used was more matter of fact. 

Overall I'd give it 3-3.5 our of 5 stars,