Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy

In November I finished reading two books. First was Benjamin Percy's The Dark Net and the second one was Blake Crouch's Dark Matter.

Both of them are thrillers, well paced, good story plots.

The Dark Net felt like a science fiction in the beginning but it turned out to be a super natural story. Not bad as a page turner, but I think the author Benjamin Percy has much more potential than he displayed in The Dark Net. He pointed some of the darkest corners of the web and how it can spirals out of bound, ushering in the dark ages of future. Plausible.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch has a good story plot, that unfolds fast and furious. The quantum mechanics based theme, the Schrodinger Cat theory, alive and dead at the same time, the multiverse, the intense longing to return to the loved ones made the reading memorable.

Blake Crouch's writing was fluid, some of the words and sentences I found to be profound, quoting a few below:

"And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace."

A second one:

“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.” 

About the intricate idea of multiverse, here is a simple description:

“Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.” 

Most humans take the life they have as granted, forgetting the preciousness of every moment we spend with our loved ones. Here is the writer's take on this:

"I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together. "

The following words may be sentimental but I believe these are fundamentally true:

"I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I’ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it’s because of you."

From Benjamin Percy's The Dark Net, here are few good quotes I found to be worth sharing:

"There is a balance to the world—of light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil, yin and yang, up and down, spicy and sweet, Sonny and Cher, however you want to think about it. And she operates by a more simplified, elemental version of any religious doctrine: “Any time things get too dark, the world goes blind.” This she says with a spark of her Zippo."

An observation on world's past painful events:

"But every once in a while, one of the old ones will come. A Destroyer. And when the old ones come, the darkness organizes, becomes a widespread contagion. In Germany, where train cars crammed with Jews thundered toward smokestacks belching ash. In Rwanda, where machetes flashed in the night."

About humanity's blindness:

"Everyone is making sense of the unknown world with what limited, contradictory sensory equipment we have at our disposal. We’re all, to different degrees, blind."

 A sad but true observation:

"The universe has been around for a long time before us—and it will go on without us. We’re the merest speck in the unfathomable reach of its timeline and geography."

Both books are worth reading.