Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
As a programmer that has been steeped in Silicon Valley culture for the past couple of years, reading Microserfs feels like a sort of pilgrimage I had to make. Strangely enough, for the most part, it seems that things haven’t changed in the Valley a whole lot in the past 20 years ago. Nerds were still nerds; the tech world still had a problem with women, both then and now. In fact, it’s amazing what hasn’t changed between the first and second tech bubbles. That said, I was a bit underwhelmed by Microserfs. There’s not much of a story here—more like a series of vignettes—and while it had some good insight and provocative one-liners, I didn’t find it as a whole to be a terribly compelling read. The characters were varied and interesting, though, and as they’re mostly what drove the story, Microserfs was a success in that regard. I’d consider this to be “mandatory reading” for programmers, along with Ellen Ullman’s The Bug, and certainly it covers an interesting piece of history, but I wouldn’t expect much more out of Microserfs than that.
Mixed feelings about this one. I've found the characters both thoroughly unlikable and pretty entertaining to "watch". It definitely feels like it's supposed to be an informed look at the lives of geeks in the 90s, but for every detail that Coupland gets right there's another one that feels completely out of place. I guess that my biggest issue was the last third, that just dragged on without getting anywhere.
Microserfs is the chronicle of the lives of a group of people with no lives. To be honest, I didn't think I would like this book very much. It's disconnected, all-over-the-place, and has a lot of techie words that I didn't understand without looking them up. But it's thought-provoking, too. It made me think of people and life in new ways; it's nerdy but philosophical. It's not eloquently written, but it's not supposed to be. It's unpredictable... you could open up to a random page and see something like "The goal of human existence is to prove we're more than animals" or "Dusty was convinced that her baby would be a grapefruit". You just have to read it for yourself. It's filled with so many possibly revolutionary ideas that you'd never expect from a book about a group of socially underdeveloped nerds.
I just chose this as my favorite book in the 30 Days Book Challenge on Facebook, so I might as well review it, even though "favorite book" is a nebulous distinction at best and "what's your favorite book?" is a stupid fucking question and I am afraid this might be a sentimental favorite more than anything else.
So yeah, I read this when I was 14 or 15. I bought it because it had a neat mirror cover with a Lego man. I didn't know Douglas Coupland was the voice of a generation, and anyway, it wasn't even MY generation. I was a dorky high school kid, but not dorky in any way much connected to computer programming, so there was no reason for me fall for a book about a bunch of cynical Microsoft employees living in pre-tech boom Silicon Valley.
But I loved it. I read and re-read it through high school and college. It is a super-dated '90s time capsule now, but it felt entirely new and fresh to me back then, and in many ways, it predicted how technology and the internet would explode all over our lives by the end of that decade. It's also basically like reading someone's LiveJournal or blog -- the book takes the form of a digital journal kept by the narrator -- which wasn't something you could just do back then. It isn't just the diary entries that tell the story, it's the everything else: run-downs of dream Jeopardy! categories for all of the characters, musings on pop culture minutia like the sociological messages communicated by various cereal mascots [Cap'n Crunch -- Reasons this cereal is decadent: a) Colonialist exploiter pursues naive Crunchberry cultures to plunder. b) Drunkenness, torture and debauchery implicit in long ocean cruises.] Lots of lists. Lots of navel-gazing.
It was what I imagined being an adult would be like: working at a job you felt ambivalent about with a bunch of people who became your closest friends, sharing inside jokes and slowly gathering the wisdom that comes with age. I was too introverted in college and made the mistake of living alone, and I would read this and yearn for that kind of connection and camaraderie. Sappy, I know.
I haven't read it since at least 2005, right after I picked up a paperback to replace the hardcover copy that I had read into tatters (the only book I have ever done that for). I have fond memories of the characters, I remember the whole plot, I still reference sections randomly (most often this part about how different parts of your body store emotional pain). I kind of never want to read it again. I might hate it: I certainly haven't read a Coupland book since that was a quarter as endearing (and I read a lot of them before I realized I was chasing the dragon). It is self-conscious and twee and post-modern and has a bunch of different fonts and, like, entire pages filled with a single word or random nonsense or ones and zeroes or no vowels, followed by all vowels. It is big and sloppy and emotional and I don't know if I am still big and sloppy and emotional enough to love it liked I used to.
Sure, favorite book. Why not.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 1: Favorite book.
So yeah, I read this when I was 14 or 15. I bought it because it had a neat mirror cover with a Lego man. I didn't know Douglas Coupland was the voice of a generation, and anyway, it wasn't even MY generation. I was a dorky high school kid, but not dorky in any way much connected to computer programming, so there was no reason for me fall for a book about a bunch of cynical Microsoft employees living in pre-tech boom Silicon Valley.
But I loved it. I read and re-read it through high school and college. It is a super-dated '90s time capsule now, but it felt entirely new and fresh to me back then, and in many ways, it predicted how technology and the internet would explode all over our lives by the end of that decade. It's also basically like reading someone's LiveJournal or blog -- the book takes the form of a digital journal kept by the narrator -- which wasn't something you could just do back then. It isn't just the diary entries that tell the story, it's the everything else: run-downs of dream Jeopardy! categories for all of the characters, musings on pop culture minutia like the sociological messages communicated by various cereal mascots [Cap'n Crunch -- Reasons this cereal is decadent: a) Colonialist exploiter pursues naive Crunchberry cultures to plunder. b) Drunkenness, torture and debauchery implicit in long ocean cruises.] Lots of lists. Lots of navel-gazing.
It was what I imagined being an adult would be like: working at a job you felt ambivalent about with a bunch of people who became your closest friends, sharing inside jokes and slowly gathering the wisdom that comes with age. I was too introverted in college and made the mistake of living alone, and I would read this and yearn for that kind of connection and camaraderie. Sappy, I know.
I haven't read it since at least 2005, right after I picked up a paperback to replace the hardcover copy that I had read into tatters (the only book I have ever done that for). I have fond memories of the characters, I remember the whole plot, I still reference sections randomly (most often this part about how different parts of your body store emotional pain). I kind of never want to read it again. I might hate it: I certainly haven't read a Coupland book since that was a quarter as endearing (and I read a lot of them before I realized I was chasing the dragon). It is self-conscious and twee and post-modern and has a bunch of different fonts and, like, entire pages filled with a single word or random nonsense or ones and zeroes or no vowels, followed by all vowels. It is big and sloppy and emotional and I don't know if I am still big and sloppy and emotional enough to love it liked I used to.
Sure, favorite book. Why not.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 1: Favorite book.
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i couldnt get into the book:/ very insightful tho
A comforting reread every few years. Still brilliant and relevant. This is Coupland at his best.
I got several pages into this before I realized that I had already read something by [a:Douglas Coupland|1886|Douglas Coupland|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1264509011p2/1886.jpg] ([b:The Gum Thief|386043|The Gum Thief|Douglas Coupland|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427120086s/386043.jpg|2037794]) and didn't really care for it but I didn't have anything else to read so I carried it on. I still found his writing style odd but I enjoyed this one more. It was a little hard for me to push through all the random philosophizing but I really enjoyed the underlying story.