Friday, November 20, 2009

You + Me = Us (Calculus)

I really liked this book. A lot.

This was a weird mashup of forty different possible answers to the big question of what exactly happens when we die. Funny, bizarre, quantum-physics-esque. Many were incredibly poignant. All gave you something to think about.

In one possible afterlife, you get to relive every moment that you've ever had on earth, except this time, all the moments are reshuffled and placed into categories. So, in the afterlife, you spend five months reading magazines on the toilet, three years swallowing food, three days calculating restaurant tips, twenty-seven hours experiencing pain, thirty years sleeping, eighteen days staring into the open refrigerator...

In another afterlife, you wake up and find out that you and the rest of the human race were really just creations, super-complex walking eating cameras that have a lifespan of 80+ years and are built to record all the marvels of earth and space and figure out the essential questions of the universe, cameras which were constructed by these tiny dim-witted immobile creatures that aren't big enough to explore earth on their own.

And 38 more. The writer, David Eagleman, is a neuroscientist, which may or may not buy this book some street cred, you know, depending on if you're into scientists or whatever. But regardless, it's a book that makes you think for a long time after you finish. And that's always a good kind of book, right?

3 comments:

Dorothy said...

But I've told you that we come back as our own loving dogs. So, we can spend 5 months chasing squirrels in our backyard, and 8 months gnawing on chewies from Petland, and 3 months licking ourselves. Did you forget?

Julie Ritchey said...

Lamplbanter is my new favorite part of this whole blog...

Allison said...

ooooo i LOVE books about death.