Life After God

Rating:
Summary: Deeply satisfying in every way
Review: I lent "Life after God" to a good friend that couldn't afford to buy it himself. I miss it immeasurely every day. That's just about the only comment I can make right now, I fear a lack of words if I try to praise the masterpiece "Life after God". I'm sorry...

Rating:
Summary: A story of an unquiet life
Review: Coupland's book is intimate like a diary and close like a friend. It doesn't tell you where it is going or what it is ment to be. It is for all those people who believe being is more than doing.

Rating:
Summary: Read the book, then listen to the tape. . for your own good.
Review: I own both book and cassette versions of Life After God, and strongly recommend to anyone considering purchasing the cassette version "Read the book first!" Sometimes I would like to kick in the teeth of the person responsible for Coupland's abridgements, because they always seem to leave out the most profound bits. As to the book itself, LAG was my second tryst into Coupland's world of people so achingly familiar-dissimilar to me (having been initially sucked in by the shiny, Lego-minimalist cover of Microserfs, which I also own in cassette and dead-tree formats). Admittedly, I was unprepared for the ambience of despair and confusion, but felt the book did not suffer for it. Especially pleasant is hearing Coupland read in his soft, Canadian accent. All in all, LAG secured Douglas Coupland both the prestigious positions of "Author I Would Most Like to Emulate" and "Author I Would Most Like to Have Dinner With". In fact, when I log off tonight, I think I'll eat some Oreos and reread LAG on the couch for awhile. .

Rating:
Summary: Slow lives in a short earth space
Review: The history is not the same to everybody. After the bomb, for example, we have a lot of different experiences. If the family gone, you can travel around the world, but, like Emerson saids: you're only sending ruins to the ruins. From this book, the people have to do an inner travel to know themselves. If you have a son or a cat, if you wait for some letter (remember Laurie Anderson), you only have to imagine that, because the reality is not in this age, the reality is only the velocity of your memory. In another way, the same work, the same friend and the same food in the same Burguer King or KFC, is not the life, is only the road that you drive in your own responsability. We have to read our lives from our wishes, not from our necesity. And if we want to sleep fine, we have to run so deep, out of nightmare and dreams.

Rating:
Summary: This book was incredible
Review: Coupland's Life After God was THE most depressing book I have EVER had the pleasure of reading.

Rating:
Summary: And the light shone down.....
Review: Douglas Coupland's words and stories string together like a dream, seemingly effortlessly. Life After God is a window into the lives of realistic characters people of this generation can identify with. This book is a welcomed break from moral doctrines and "objective" condemnations of today's anxieties.There is no intellectual pretense to Coupland's writing. You are left feeling as if you've just come out of meditation, enlightened and refreshed.

Rating:
Summary: I never want Coupland's books to end so it only gets a 9.
Review: A small book full of stories: some related, some not. I felt I was eavesdropping on most of the characters but Coupland writes with such pull that I couldn't put it down. It is a quick read full of real-people-feelings and stream of consciousness. I'm heading off to the library now to find other works by him.

Rating:
Summary: Poignant Vignettes on life
Review: This is a good book, effective but not great. The series of stories as told by the disenfranchised narrator is filled with keen observations and poignant vigneetes, together forming a good carricature of the suburban lifestyle during these safe, post Cold War years where spirituality dwindles. I found the apocalyptic seres of vignette the most effective, as well as the relationship to the sister. The ending is a bit of a let down, as Coupland didn't really have a run up to the conclusion, it just appeared as a stretch.

Rating:
Summary: After all, there is someone else out there...
Review: There seems to be a strong corp of Coupland admirers. I am not one of these. I probably found this book while searching for morbid tautoligies in a bottle of sorts, lost on the internet, at home on my couch; Of course, I just can't remember...or bring myself to care.

For years I've been lost on a personal life raft --Todd's couch--for a low price of ten dollars per cushion per week. Not bad when you consider the alternative: swimming. Todd has a job now, and I try to stay out of his way. I sleep when Todd goes to work in the day, and I sit and read and smoke cigarettes at night, alone, in a darkness all my own. Things are just better this way. Occasionally the spectre of loneliness creeps in, weaseling its way into an otherwise serene morning. At times like these a book like Life After God can mean everything. There is someone else out there; There is someone else on the outside.

If this makes any sense to you, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you've ever spent a weekend at the kind of dive motel found in East Texas thinking about 'Life, the Universe, and Everything' you will probably enjoy this book. Life After God is one of those books you read realizing something important is being said, something deep, but you never really get what 'that' is and even weirder -- you don't really care to find out.

The book lost 2 stars because I just feel like it could have been 2 stars better, like the stars were there for the taking, and Coupland let me down.

Rating:
Summary: Catcher in the Rye, 20 years on...
Review: This book is for anyone who has reached that point in their life where they question whether there is any logic to the seemingly random series of memories they have aquired thus far. The magic of this book is missed by the editorial reviews. If you read Catcher in the Rye and then grew up, it's time to read this.