A wonderful book. It's probably in my top 50 books of all time. The stories here are moving and sad in a quiet way.

This is a book that takes me back to a certain time in my life that I really enjoyed. I was in my late 20's and working in a job I really enjoyed. This book and it's stories were like short bursts of energy for me and was a precurser to the glory that was Microserfs.

Il libro è scritto come un diario, ad ogni pensiero associa un disegno. Pensieri brevi, diretti, dove descrive la situazione, il momento.
Lo scrittore cerca di colmare un vuoto che non capisce, tenta di "trovare quel punto dentro di noi che si mantiene puro, quel punto che non riusciamo mai a sfiorare ma che sappiamo esistere." Solamente dopo un lungo percorso di solitudine, alla fine capisce e svela il suo segreto.

(Finished on Thursday but forgot to check it off)

Honestly, the only story I liked was Patty Hearst. The rest kind of depressed me. Every story is written in the same voice, which makes it see, like they’re all about the same guy,

Mooie, zeer beeldende kortverhalen. Terwijl ik mijn uiterste best doe 7(!) andere boeken uit te lezen nam dit kleine boekje me meteen mee en wilde ik het meteen uitlezen. Spoiler alert: niet voor tere zieltjes, het is allemaal vrij zwaarmoedig. Elk verhaal gaat volgens mij over eenzaamheid en naar betekenis zoeken in het leven. Niet echt een “vrolijke” verzameling desalniettemin meeslepend, goed geschreven en universeel in de positieve zin van het woord. Ik houd ook erg van de kleine illustraties aan het begin van elk verhaal.

Should have been named My Ennui.

A reread of an old favourite. Recently signed by the author.

One day later: Actually screw it this deserves five stars, I was hesitant because it's a harrowing experience to binge read the stories but they deserve all five. Also I forgot to mention that more than the gloom of OK Computer the stories reminded me of early Modest Mouse (pre-The Moon and Antarctica): there's driving on empty interstates and stuff, and the setting is the Pacific Northwest, and there's the sense of sadness with some sense that maybe, possibly, things could get better.

This was really good; the only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because it's so depressing. That's not quite accurate; the sense that God and happiness could return lurks, but never appears. Perhaps this wasn't good to binge-read during a dark rainy morning.

Anyway, this thematically follows up from  Generation X, but strips away the humor and leaves you with the sincere desperation. It's very turn-of-the-century, in the mode of anxiety that I feel culminated in Radiohead's OK Computer and then with the 2000s faded away.

Just because of this, it's worth it:

“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”

Or this...

“We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.”

I can’t quite decide on a 3 or a 4 here. 3 because I felt like it was light on plot and heavy on snippets and sayings that may well have been composed using a “Gen X Wisdom magnet words” set. On the 4 side, there’s the fact that it’s a short read but packed with depth, and there really is a lot of wisdom in these pages. I wish the stories has been fleshed out just a little bit more.

Coupland is at his best when he writes on the spiritual. This book is a collection of short stories about various Gen-Xers living a life after god, as part of the first generation raised without any religion. Each are very profound, and all of Coupland's weakenesses as a writer-the cutesiness and hipster lingo, the product placement in place of character development, the faux-Kerouac prose-are nowhere to be found. Just simple, melancholy stories about how we really do need god to connect to something greater than ourselves.

It's an excellent book which resonates more as you age. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I feel awfully ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, I can think of very few few books that I've enjoyed reading less. I had to force myself to finish this one, and honestly, I probably wouldn't have if I didn't know I would have a quiz on it. For me, this book was almost unrelievedly depressing, though I know some people disagree with me on this point. On the other hand, I think this is an important book, and a very valuable one -- a story that needs to be heard by religious and non-religious people alike. For people living "post-God" lives, I think it will be thought-provoking.

Coupland sets out to paint a picture of "life after God," and it seems to me that he succeeds. It's not a pretty picture. At all. The book is full of characters who are longing for something, searching for something, but they don't know what. They've never been given anything to believe in, and most of them aren't having much luck cobbling anything together for themselves. They feel helpless and isolated -- in large part, it seems to me, because they lack both community and any kind of shared narrative on which a community could be based. They are adrift in a postmodern landscape where nothing is certain and life seems to drain away into melancholy self-absorption.

This book, like the world it describes, isn't exactly without hope. Coupland and his characters are reaching for something beyond themselves, something transcendent: at least they recognize their need. As a Christian, I would say that they have not yet found what they need, haven't found the God who is the only true basis for hope. I hope they keep searching, and that they open themselves up to the possibility of encountering a God, a story, and a community that they don't have to devise for themselves.