Are you happy with your life?

Jason Dessen is living a good life. He has a decent job, a wife he loves, and a son in a little brownstone in Chicago. Sure there’s choices that he made in the past, choices that he wonders about, but for the most part he is happy.

“As long as I’m with you, I know exactly who I am.”

One day, coming home from a bar he’s almost hit by a car. And then he’s kidnapped. He doesn’t know why or where, he’s knocked out and when he wakes up he’s in a strange new world. A world where he is still Jason Dessen, but he’s no longer married, instead he’s a top researcher who just came back from a mysterious trip in a strange box…

Dark matter is a pretty easy read for the most part. Honestly I had my review lined up as “easy beach read.” Not terrible, just pretty good. But something about the ending stuck with me. It really tripped me up thinking about the choices that we make and how those choices lead to our life, my own, uniquely mine life.

“We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”

Still the language of the book is a bit plain at time and Crouch clips a lot of paragraphs or reduces them to sentences in order to keep the pace of the book. The book is a quick read, but it might stay with you for days. And it might just make you question

“Are you happy with your life?”