In the afterlife you discover that all the goodreaders are in the same walled-off section of heaven. God greets you in the form of your ideal librarian. In the goodreads heaven library you witness the librarian gamut: examples include a fatherly professor, a stern but gentle middle-aged woman, and a supermodel in a plaid skirt with legs that won’t quit. If you are a seventeen year old girl God is a combination of Ben Harrison and that guy from 500 Days of Summer.The more time you spent on goodre...

***NO SPOILERS***An enjoyable set of inventive "what if?" vignettes, Sum is Eagleman's envisionings of various versions of the afterlife. All are impressively unique, and some really stretch the mind. Be sure to open this book while fully alert. Eagleman's background as a neuroscientist is, at times, on full display in these pages as some of his ideas veer into the complex and obscure with talk of quarks and atoms. Readers not inclined toward the scientific may find these boring. Fortunately, th...

Some of these stories were indeed imaginative scenarios of what the afterlife is like or what God might be like. But because his Heaven or God is always imagined as some inversion of a human hierarchy or scale...it gets repetitive very fast. God always lacks some human quality that intrinsically keeps him as God and us as humans, or...he's just like us, but just a smaller or larger scale. Because his Heaven is always some rearranged variation of the human life, all the stories start to sound the...

This book blew me away; I underlined and starred dozens of sentences and typed them in to my friends on email. Sum tells 40 vignettes from the afterlife, but you quickly figure out that (a) the stories are mutually exclusive (if one is true then the others cannot be), and (b) the stories are not about the afterlife at all, but instead unusual portraits about the here-and-now. After I read it I found out that the author David Eagleman is a brain scientist during the day, and that explains a bit a...

Now I've read Sum twice. First on a plane flight in one big sitting, then years later one story a day for 40 days. Honestly, the first way was better. The stories that are good are really, really good. But none of them have much staying power, so the emotional rollercoaster of reading them one after another was more fun and more resonant than taking my time.5 stars on my first reading, 4 stars on my second.

My favourite video game of all time is a homemade 2D platformer on the little-known Yaroze—a black, programmable Playstation—called Time Slip . In this game you are a snail with a one-minute lifespan who has to use his time on screen to stand on buttons that open doors to other parts of the level. Once the minute is up, the snail is reincarnated as another snail at the beginning of the level, or at the latest checkpoint. The ghost of your previous snail remains on the map, reliving its moveme...

David Eagleman - image from his site You do not have to be a subscriber to any of the more common religions in this world to harbor some notion, some hope, that there might be a form of personal existence beyond death. Eagelman has come up with forty possible post-mortem futures and offers them up in bite-size stories in this slim volume. The tales range from tedious to inspired. There is an O-Henry-esque tale in which a man’s greatest desire is to become a horse. A vision of God as being fasci

Such a quaint little read! I didn't know what to expect when going into this book but I was pleasantly surprised. Eagleman takes the reader to mystical and dark places as he contemplates what the afterlife may hold. From a heaven where Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) is Queen to an afterlife where you act as the extras in living peoples dreams - this book is a real look into an incredible imagination. Although each tale is only a couple of pages long I was fully transported to each ghostly...

If I could give this book 6 stars I would! I thought it was brilliant and I plan to read it again and often. Sum is a collection of short stories that are visions of the way we could conceive of life after we die. It is a clever way to think about your life from afar. It alternates between esoteric, profound, and hilarious.

I loved this book. Normally I find it difficult to read an entire volume of short fiction (the stories in this book are so short they could almost be called sudden fiction), but this collection of hypothetical versions of the afterlife was so cleverly done that I couldn't stop reading it. Brilliant! Even though I've already read it I want to buy a copy to add to my personal library.

A charming little thought-experiment conducted by a writer of rich yet limited imagination. This book has received rave reviews in a number of journals over the past few months, and I was on a waiting list at the library for weeks before I had a chance to check it out myself. Meh.Clearly influenced by the structured, dreamlike musings of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Sum: Fory Tales from the Afterlives dances neatly through a series of post-life possibilities. Some are clever, some are o...

A beautiful elegy for the lives we have chosen to lead or not to lead. Sum is a wonderous piece of writing. While the book is comprised of 40 imaginings of the afterlife, it is much more a celebration of everything which has come before it. After reading Sum, I was left awestruck again by the world around us. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

This is a suite of variations on the possibilities of different kinds of afterlives. Each of the forty tales is usually only about a couple of pages long, but each one is densely packed with mind-bending what-ifs. He imagines wildly different ways that an afterlife, if it existed, could be structured. Some are exquisitely sad, such as this first paragraph from 'Metamorphosis': "There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the

Fitfully imaginative, often repetitive meditations on what might happen after we die that frequently get sidetracked into cute commentaries on how we live now. Which isn't unexpected, I suppose. But the most entertaining and thoughtful of these stories truly fulfill the promise of the premise; the others just didn't do much for me. Also, way too many of them involve variations on the idea that we are unknowingly cogs in some vast system, but this might not bug if I hadn't read the book in two si...

A collection of forty short texts describing different possible afterlives that gives you a few gems here and there, but also leaves a lot to be desired. The characters are completely anonymous - which is fine. This is simply a collection of thought experiments. In one story we are atoms in Gods body, in another the dead are not allowed to rest until everyone alive have forgotten about them (Shakespeare must be pretty mad by now if this one turns out to be true). There are a lot of stories circl...

5★“Everyone is a brother to all, and for the first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth: true equality. The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to pr...

Work. Of. Genius.

Want to stretch your mind for a bit? Check out this little book packed with imaginative possibilities of what happens after you die. Written by a neuroscientist, Sum captures many facets of the Afterlife that are told succinctly in a series of vignettes that pull from science, fantasy, sci-fi, mythology, pop culture, religion, and probably a few nightmares and daydreams. But what if....?

I read Thai version last night. A good translation and very thought-provoking. Recommended!

Pure delight to those who love speculations and out-of-the-world stories. Pun intended.