2025 Reading Challenge discussion

This thread is to discuss Upgrade by Blake Crouch.

Pages: 352 pages

Length: 1 month (March)

Participants: SarahKat, LinaVer

Everyone reads at their own pace during a Buddy Read. Because participants can be at different parts of the book at different times, it is extremely important to mark spoilers so that the book is not ruined for someone who is not as far along as others!!!

Mark spoilers by placing {spoiler} before the text and {/spoiler} after the text but use the < and > instead of the { and }.

Here are some questions to help get the conversation started! Feel free to look up discussion questions specific to this book or come up with your own. Just make sure any questions that contain spoilers are under spoiler tags.
Discussion questions are not required but may be a fun way to talk about the book and get to know each other!

Prior to starting:
What prompted you to join this buddy read?
Have you read this author before? What do you think of their other books?

Mid-read:
What character or ideas do you relate to the most and why?
Do you have any favorite quotes or scenes?

After reading:
What was enjoyable or not-so-enjoyable about this book?
Did this book change your perception about anything, either within the book (character development) or in real life?

Hi Lina! My library hold just became available for the audio of this so I'll start today. Hopefully the audio is easy enough to follow. Sci-fi can be hit-or-miss in that regard.

What prompted you to join this buddy read?
This came up on my TBR Jar challenge

Have you read this author before? What do you think of their other books?
Yes, and I've loved all of them! Dark Matter and Recursion were great and I'm thinking this will be similar.

Through Chapter 4: (view spoiler)[I appreciate Crouch's ability to write a pretty complex science-y story while still being easy to read and understand for those of us who are not PhD-holders of genetics.

Very intense story so far too. Logan's genome is changing and he's turning into a super-human and now I'm sure he's on his way to see his mother. I wonder whose side he will end up on. (hide spoiler)]

Hey SarahKat, I'm so happy to be buddies on this book with you. :) And I hope that maybe some other people will join.

What prompted me to join this buddy read ➡️ At the end of 2024 I told myself I will be a more active member of this group, and I remember looking through the buddy-sign up topic and I found your comment about Upgrade, read the blurb and it sounded really interesting. Also, I really want to get into sci-fi again.

I've never read anything from this author yet, so I am quite excited.
I do have to finish a few other books before jumping into this one though.

Sci-fi can be really hit-or-miss with me but I really like how Crouch does his. If you like this one I definitely recommend the 2 I mentioned above.

Just finished Part 1: (view spoiler)[It's a little hard to tell where this is going, other than right now the siblings are at odds with what to do about the upgrade. I'm enjoying the journey though. I didn't see it coming that their mom would already be gone and they'd be on their own. Logan has a much more human view of what should be done (destroy it) and I wonder if that's because he has a family. I don't think Cara has one. (hide spoiler)]

Through Part 2:
What character or ideas do you relate to the most and why?
(view spoiler)[I think I have too much empathy for individual people's suffering to be able to unleash a virus that will painfully and horrifically kill 13% of the population while potentially saving the rest. So I'm more on Logan's side than his sister's. And like he says, upgrading the people who survive it won't necessarily mean they'll make the "right" decision. I mean, him and his sister don't agree on what to do. What makes her think everyone being upgraded will make everyone agree on important things? If anything the battles and wars will be deadlier because everyone will be way smarter. (hide spoiler)]

Do you have any favorite quotes or scenes?
(view spoiler)[The Glasgow scene was memorable. That's when I started feeling the weight of this genetic upgrade. Not only will it not work on some people, but the way it doesn't work is terrible. (hide spoiler)]

Other thoughts: (view spoiler)[Just now we saw his wife on a date with someone else. It's very sad for Logan and even sadder that he can turn his feelings off. It's interesting he can do that for what's best for his wife and daughter but not so much for what's best for humanity as a whole.
I live in the part of the country some of the book takes place (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado area) and I always appreciate when the author gets it right. A lot of authors tend to make us caricatures, or just have no clue where things are in relation to other things, or what a town of 25,000 people actually looks like. It helps that Blake Crouch lives in Denver, Colorado. (hide spoiler)]

Through the end!

What was enjoyable or not-so-enjoyable about this book?
This question (and most of my ending thoughts) are in my review>

Did this book change your perception about anything, either within the book (character development) or in real life?
Not really, but the ethical dilemma presented in the book isn't really a new one. (view spoiler)[I personally would not be able to kill a bunch of people now to save another bunch of people in the future. Like Logan, I would try to find another way. However, I don't think the compassion gene will do that much? Humans already know too much about the world. The stuff he talks about from Robin Dunbar on you can only care about 150 people is true! We are not built to carry the entire world's woes and yet we hear about it all of the time. Everyone has depression or anxiety now and we wonder why? It's because we are exposed to more of other people's suffering than we are equipped to handle. I feel like genetically enhancing our capacity for compassion will just make that worse. (hide spoiler)]

I hope you like this one when you get to it! Looking forward to hearing what you think

Finally starting this one today, SarahKat, so sorry it took me so long! I will update as soon as I have any thoughts (if any, haha).

LinaVer wrote: "Finally starting this one today, SarahKat, so sorry it took me so long! I will update as soon as I have any thoughts (if any, haha)."

Enjoy!

I'm on page 90 now. It's going slow because I have some busier days, but the book's getting a bit more interesting now also. At the beginning I found it a bit hard to get into. I find it quite scary how many of the "sci-fi" things, topics are actual and real right now, but that also makes it all the more interesting to read about.

I like the writing style, it feels a bit like a futuristic thriller/ detective story. I think if it was like a very serious science fiction kind of style, I would find it too hard to read, as I am not as used to it. For example, the genre classis I, Robot was a bit of too serious for me, no matter how well written. So I am happy to be reading Upgrade so far.

LinaVer wrote: "I'm on page 90 now. It's going slow because I have some busier days, but the book's getting a bit more interesting now also. At the beginning I found it a bit hard to get into. I find it quite scar..."

I agree. I think Crouch's sci-fi is very accessible because it's set in not-so-distant future with technology that we could easily see coming in the future. Some of those hardcore sci-fi ones are too much for me as well.

The fact that it’s based in the not-so-far future and features so many slightly familiar things is what’s chilling me to the bone while reading it, Sarah! 🙈😱 I mean, in a sense it is a good thing because that means the book is affecting me emotionally and intellectually, as it’s very well written. It’s making me think all these somewhat bigger thoughts and topics but they also scare me equally as much.

Also, I am way into the second part now, where (view spoiler)[ he enters the house where his sister lives and is about to have a meal with her (hide spoiler)] and the suspense is high about what’s going to happen. I have no clue as to how the book might end, which is also a good sign for me.

SarahKat wrote: "Sci-fi can be really hit-or-miss with me but I really like how Crouch does his. If you like this one I definitely recommend the 2 I mentioned above.

Just finished Part 1: [spoilers removed]"

Yes, that moment with mother (view spoiler)[and them finding her dead in that car (hide spoiler)] was also unexpected for me, and also quite intense. I guess, it also brought more human-ness to the story, by way of (view spoiler)[showing them experiencing grief and then also having to choose “sides”, including all the other human emotions/feelings (guilt? sorrow? etc) attached to their decisions. (hide spoiler)]

I’m now in the third part. I came to this passage:
“The sky was the same stark gray as the land, and there would’ve been no dimension to the space at all—no horizon, no sense of depth—if the ground wasn’t darker by the slightest degree.”
It’s repeated in chapters 4 and 13. In chapter 4 (view spoiler)[it’s a dream he has, in which he stands there with his wife and daughter and a black chasm opens between him and them, separating them forever. If I remember correctly, this dream came to him when he got his first upgrade, and so I now kind of think it was a bit like a glimpse into the future because the upgrade and everything that happens subsequently is the chasm, I guess. He’s never going back to his normal life, and even though he might have not known it consciously at the time, he knew it subconsciously because it came out in a dream/premonition. Interesting then, how that same passage is then repeated in chapter 13, as a dream again, just reaffirming that but this time he lets himself and his feelings “slip” and get out, even if for a moment: “A sob burst out of me. And then another. A dam of grief exploding, and for sixty seconds, I let myself go to pieces, staring unblinking at all I had lost.” (hide spoiler)] This cyclical nature of writing and all that can be expressed through it, and this whole part in chapter 13 was just really beautiful for me.

LinaVer wrote: "I’m now in the third part. I came to this passage:
“The sky was the same stark gray as the land, and there would’ve been no dimension to the space at all—no horizon, no sense of depth—if the ground..."

I didn't even notice that honestly, maybe because I listened to it on audio, but you're right that is beautiful!