Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

This book reminded me a lot of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, only not quite as good. I still enjoyed it but Eggers' book seems edgier to me and more well-written. Basically I'm a sucker for any book with descriptions of driving on beautiful California highways. I've never been further west than Chicago, so any book with descriptions of A. California, B. Colorado/mountains, or C. the Pacific Northwest, gets me drunk with desire to visit these places. And somehow this gets lodged in my brain as a positive thing. I guess I'm also a sucker for anything that's 90's nostalgia. I was a teenager in the 90's who wished she was an adult, so books about being an adult in the 90's appeal to my teenage self that's locked away somewhere. So these two elements appealed to me.

The textual manipulation was kind of dumb to me because I don't really get into that kind of stuff. I found myself skipping the free-association pages by the time I was midway through the book. The writing itself wasn't that great either, which kind of bugged me. I know this isn't a super-serious text or anything, but it seems like we have too many books in the world to be publishing anything that's not excellent. I think I'd like to read more by Douglas Coupland, but only as a quick read after something heavier. Coupland is a balm to be used in the same manner as chicklit, and I think that's the bottom line of this review.