It was an eerie experience to read a book set in the tech world of the early 90s... on yellowed paper. 'Bill' (Gates) looms large although the group of Microsoft employees soon make the jump to a start up.

It was such a tender book, with two families... Dan the narrator and his parents (and the deceased brother Jed), and the family created by the friends - finding food flat enough to post under a door to a holed up friend, gently tolerating the physique-obsessed Todd as he wheels through umpteen political ideologies, the remarkable female bonding (the 'chunks' discussion and the calm response of the listening men make this a book which would be well read by young people today)

I was not entirely sure that the 'unusual' elements added a great deal - the words which are Dan documenting thoughts perhaps, but the pages of 'meaningless' characters didn't seem to although the way the story was chopped up and paced did work well.

This novel, written and set in the mid-1990s, is about a group of Microsoft employees who quit, move to Silicon Valley, and start a company of their own. I first read (and loved) it in 1997, shortly after moving to Silicon Valley myself, so rereading it was strongly nostalgic of both the era and my younger self. This time around, I wondered how many of the now-familiar technical and cultural references were meaningless to me back then.

MICROSERFS is great as a depiction of 90s geek culture and as a portrait of an engaging group of friends. The story is presented as a series of journal entries, a format that is somewhat limiting and leads to the inclusion of various boring details during the lulls when nothing's happening in the narrator's life. In general, it's not a plot-heavy book -- that synopsis I gave in the first sentence is pretty much the story -- but I was happy just spending time with the characters. So despite the weaknesses in the narrative, I enjoyed the reread, and I remain a fan of the way this book captures a time and place.

When I was in high school, I read Generation X and Life After God and was thrilled by these tales of wry, vibrant, lost characters who fought for real meaning when their culture caused them to shrug at tragedy and love and weep over reruns and advertising campaigns (I was a pretty lonely teenager, obviously.) When Microserfs came out, I remember picking it up at the bookstore a few times (maybe this was '95 or '96?) and thinking, "Oh, it's this story about the 'information-superhighway' with all these "inventive" gimmicks (like two pages of binary code) and characters who live for email and chat rooms and Who Gives a Fuck?" At the time, my family didn't have a computer, I didn't have an email account, and it seemed like Coupland had fallen face-first into an orgy of trend-humping. It seemed like these characters were actually embracing commodification, their own digitization, their own reduction to binary code. Reading it now as less of a Luddite (admittedly, with a job creating websites), it seems not only prescient (one of the characters notes he receives 60 emails a day, they drink Starbucks, et al. al. al.), but also prophetic-- it doesn't just know the technological future, it speaks on behalf of us in the face of the technological future. The book is about characters struggling with their own identity in face of the inevitable digital deluge. In some ways, they detest their own lego-ization, they fear the duality that seems to divide their minds and their bodies, they struggle with what a prism identity is becoming, and fight to assert their true selves in tandem with technology. And, when I read this 370-page book all the way through last night, and I was fascinated-- not just with looking for dated references to Apple's demise, or to "flame emails"-- but for they way the characters constantly struggle not only to make sense of the eternal verities, but also tremble in the face of an overwhelming technological force that they fear will make those verities inherently irrelevant. Microserfs is an argument that certain truths are always truths, no matter what trends are being fucked that day. It's an outstanding book.

I read this because a friend told me that, from what he knew as an outsider to both, Google today reminds him of Microsoft of the 90's. This book failed to convince me of that -- I mean, all the MS employees leave the company within the first 50 pages -- and also was just generally boring. I made myself finish it, because it wasn't actively making me hate life (hence the 2 stars -- I've known books that *do* (cf. "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"), but it didn't add anything to my life, my understanding of the evolution of Valley tech culture, or just about anything. It reads like a blow-by-blow diary of my freshman year of college -- and, thankfully, I didn't start blogging substantially until *after* that year, which I wouldn't care to read about!

Funnily enough, it took until I was reading it stoned one night to realize that the diary narration is actually just a cute device the author is employing to showcase this culture of geeks and nerds. But I'd failed to see that sober, because it just doesn't work, and makes me hate the narrator for writing a stupid, way-too-detailed diary.

Verdict? Don't waste your time.