You know, reading a book can be a lot like the passage of time. When I'm bored with a book or struggling to get through the pages, I mark the slow passage of every. single. page. And it takes (what feels like) forever for the minutes and the pages to pass. But when I'm truly and completely engrossed in a story, I stop paying attention to the page numbers and they just fly by. Just like when you stop looking at the clock when you're really enjoying yourself, and suddenly four hours pass and you're not sure when or how it happened.

Reading Dark Matter was the second scenario. I flew right through this book; I'd look up suddenly with 40 pages behind me, and no sense of the time or that many pages passing at all. And I loved it. This book is to me what reading should be, in captivating the mind and the imagination while keeping me hooked on the plot and its twists. But it also completely freaked me out, and I'll be thinking about it for a good while.

*Thematic spoilers*

Spoiler

So eventually we find out that this book centers around the idea that each of us has a basically infinite number of versions of ourselves, out there living in different, simultaneous realities that all come to exist when we make choices and even small observations. But that's all ok, in theory, because our conscious mind can only operate within one distinct reality. So as long as those universes don't overlap, it's all good.

Now of course, throughout the novel we discover that all is *not* good, because our protagonist (and many-times-over antagonist) Jason, in another life, gave up a future with the mother of his child to pursue his mad-scientist dreams and actually FIGURED OUT HOW TO CROSS REALITIES. Which in itself is a terrifying concept, as everyone in the book who does the crossing can and does attest. And when this alt-Jason wants the life he gave up, you just know that all hell is actively breaking loose.

The plot twists kept the pages turning at lightning speed, but there was a moment, as I was nearing the end, when I had to put the book down because the concept started to feel so frighteningly real and intense. What if we all end up like alt-Jason, regretting our choices and going to the brink of insanity to change them when it's too late? Because as it stands right now, none of us have the ability to hop into the reality that we wish we'd chosen, and if we did, as our Jason, hero-Jason discovers, it would get beyond messy. It's not that I never considered the consequences of choices before, but this book has changed the way I look at decisions. Of course, every decision has the potential to be big and life-altering. And a lot of the time, though not always, you know the really big decisions when you're making them. But it's scary to think that even the smallest decisions can be life-altering, can transform your world into one you wouldn't even recognize if you had to describe it yourself. We see this when Jason has so much trouble finding the world that is *exactly* right. At the end of the book, I found myself marveling that we manage to decide anything at all, when the trajectory of life hinges on every single decision, big and small.

This multi-reality future is not one that I want or need, but it sure does make me wonder.........