All of us have regrets. Moments when we turned left, and later wished we had turned right. When we should have taken the road less traveled – or the one more traveled. When we should have spoken up instead of staying silent. When we put our feet in our mouth and need to pull them back out again. Other colleges we should have attended. Other career fields that would have been more exciting. Other people we should have befriended.

What if you could do things again? If you could live life over? What would you change? This is the premise of three books I recently wrapped up on my iphone. They all focused on people who would die, and then their lives would start over again – yet they would remember everything from their previous lives. There was a little bit of science fiction in all of them – but not too much. And all I thought about – through all three books was what I would do differently if at the end of my life, I woke up and was a kid back in the 1980’s again.

The first book was Replay, a 1986 award winning novel by Ken Grimwood. The book opens with a 43 year old man, Jeff Winston, on the phone with his wife, who tells him they need to talk. And as he wonders what she is going to say they need to talk about, he has a heart attack and dies. Then he wakes up in his 18 year old body again. Once he realized what has happened, he begins betting on sporting events that he remembers, makes a fortune, and dies at the age of 43 again, a very unhappy man. As the book progresses, he dies many times, and each time lives a little differently. He feels trapped – like nothing he can do will change anything. And when he finally dies for the last time, he opens his eyes and is still on the phone with his wife. The book never bothers to explain why this is all happening to Mr. Winston – that is not important. Rather, thru its superior cerebral tone, the message of the book comes out: that life is best when things are a little unpredictable and there are endless possibilities out there for you to tackle.

The second book was Repeat by Neal Pollack, which just came out last year. Repeat almost seemed like a replay, or a repeat, of Replay. The books had extremely similar premises. This time, a failed screenwriter named Brad Cohen goes to sleep on his 40^th birthday after realizing he hates his life. He wakes up in the womb. And this happens over and over and over again. He tries out different careers, different styles of living, different cities, different personas. He becomes a Congressman, a stock market extraordinaire, a political pundit, a Jeopardy champion (interesting because Pollack too was a 3 time Jeopardy winner), and more. And finally, he drifts through life making the same bad decisions as the first time and manages to wake up as an ecstatic 40 year old excited to face the world he had once despised. The tone is much lighter and more whimsical, especially the description of being conscious as a baby, but the message is a repeat: that life is best faced when you don’t know what you are facing.

The final book was by far the most science-fiction-y. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North, imagines a world where more than one person gets to repeat their life. Instead, 1 in every 500,000 people dies and wakes back up. This allows messages to be passed through time – as children who have recently been reborn can find aged ‘kalachakra,’ who will then die and take the message back through time to their childhood. But the entire setting is simply that; a backdrop and a setting. The true story is that of Harry August, who on his death bed receives a message that the end of the world is accelerating and coming sooner and sooner each time people die and are reborn. Harry must solve the mystery, and in doing so, he must thwart his best friend. The book does not have a moral to it like the first two – rather is the story of two best friends – both of them geniuses who passionately care about each other, locked in a battle of wits and betrayal.

While all three books were interesting and made me think, the story of Harry August was the most fun. I was able to slip past the idea of dying and being reborn and into the struggle of friendship and duplicity. But more importantly, I spent all three books thinking about my life and what I would do differently. And even though I do have plenty of regrets and have made more than my fair share of mistakes, I don’t know if I do things all that differently. I am sure I would succumb to the some of the temptation for an easy life and play the stock market knowing that I should invest in Apple, but I have a learned a lot from screwing up. Those scars are a part of all of us. I have no doubt if I didn’t have them, I would eventually go on and just make the same mistakes, only on a bigger stage.

Scores: Repeat: 8.0. Replay: 7.0. Harry August: 8.5. Good times and a few deep thoughts.