All Families Are Psychotic
This is a good book. I don't think it is possible for Douglas Coupland to write a bad book. Like in all of his novels, the characters are memorable and colorful, the dialogue witty, and clever pop-culture references are everywhere. That being said, I had better hopes for this one. Books can be...
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This is a good book. I don't think it is possible for Douglas Coupland to write a bad book. Like in all of his novels, the characters are memorable and colorful, the dialogue witty, and clever pop-culture references are everywhere.
That being said, I had better hopes for this one. Books can be classified according to their driving force: what makes them work. Coupland has a habit of writing character-driven novels, such as Microserfs or Generation X. Better than that is the theme-driven novel, where all action says an underlying and coherent thing about life. His only work that comes close to this ideal is Miss Wyoming.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780007117512 (0007117515)
Edition language: English
The title is the basic thesis; it's expanded to suggest that one only notices this about one's own family; everybody else's family seems sane and normal. Well, the family presented here are faaaaar crazier than my family, which has a history of real, actual mental health problems. They're nuts in ...
Despite a decent prose style, this was one of those books where I pulled out before fifty pages, because I just didn't find the characters and situations believable enough to invest time and caring upon. We learn before we reach ten pages that Sarah Drummond, a thalidomide baby with one hand, is a N...
The last time I read Douglas Coupland was in the 1990s, and while I'm not sure his fiction will age well over time, I was hoping his talent would transcend the moment in which he wrote. I'm not sure if the book is too dated for me, or if my reading priorities have changed, but I was disappointed. Th...
Ugh, I hate doing this, but I put it down and I just can't bring myself to pick it back up. Most of that's due to a few newer books that I'm just more excited about at present.*edit* I finally finished this on vacation. To be honest the last third or so kind of drug out in a way that I hated, with t...
Hilarious black humour. Dark, dark humour but the satire is buzzing and sparking with ideas. As nearly always, in a Coupland book the ideas are more important than plot or even character, but after just slogging through Don Quixote, this was exactly what I needed.
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