Replay, by Ken Grimwood

Replay is a great book--probably the best book I've read this year. I found it by creating a program in java that analyzes book ratings from amazon.com. Basically, I loaded all my book reviews to amazon.com and then downloaded all the other reviews for all the books I'd read.  Then I looked for users who had read the same books as me and that had similar ratings. Once I found that list of people, I looked to see which other books they liked but that I hadn't yet read. One of the top books from this search was Replay, and I was not disappointed! (Another book in the top 5 was Pillars of the Earth which, so far, I'm not enjoying as much.)

Replay tells the story of Jeff Winston who dies at 43 and is reborn as himself in college. He goes through that life up until 43 and then he dies again, and again, and again. You might think that it would get tedious living the same life over and over again, but Grimwood does a masterful job of always keeping it interesting by having Winston continue to learn and grow throughout the novel.

One of the fascinating things about Replay is that it touches on many different subjects throughout the series of lives that Winston chooses for himself:  greed, hedonism, love, family, career and art, to name a few. With such an open-ended premise executed so well, I was worried that the ending would fall flat. However, Grimwood pulled off the perfect ending which made me laugh out loud in delight. I highly recommend this book.