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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman (Goodreads Author)

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 4,141 ratings · 861 reviews

At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dre...more

Paperback, 110 pages

Published January 12th 2010 by Vintage (first published 2009)

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Jun 06, 2010 RandomAnthony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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 goodreads the more status you have in heaven. When you first arrive God checks the library computer (there are never lines, as everyone’s different version of God has his/her own computer) and gives you a badge that displays your total hours logged onto goodreads. If you have logged many hours God shakes your hand, high-fives you, or blows you kisses. The people with the most time on their badges (these badges are gold) get the best tables at the goodreads heaven coffee shop and pick what the book clubs read. Ginny Jones is the coffee shop waitress but is never allowed to read any books. If you were involved in any goodreads fights, or ever deleted your profile, God wags his/her finger at you and makes you apologize to all involved parties. If the fight was especially egregious God makes you hug. In goodreads heaven you always look like your favorite avatar picture. In goodreads heaven you can always find your favorite place to read, whether it’s on the subway, your childhood bedroom, or the library’s corner chair. In goodreads heaven your favorite characters come to life. Many of the women goodreaders are walking around with men who look suspiciously like Jamie from Outlander.

The heaven goodreaders voted and decided that books should continue to have tangible form. They liked the smell of old pages, the feel of a trade paperback, and the sense of anticipation accompanying the moment when the librarian hands over your reserve order. Some dissenters lobbied that readers should only have to touch a cover to absorb a book’s contents, but just about everyone else said that was cheating. The dissenters were especially upset because they felt like everyone else had read Coetzee and Murakami and they wanted to catch up, but the majority ruled against them.

In goodreads heaven friend whores are in trouble. They are required to take every friend to dinner and listen to them talk for at least an hour. This was a reasonable punishment for those who wanted to pad their friends list, but God soon realized that this allowed creepy guys who only friended women the opportunity to talk with these women face to face. In turn these girl collectors can only talk with each other. They share tales of the best pics and attempt to interact with cute goodreaders but discover that, as if they were ghosts, no one but other girl collectors can see them.

In Goodreads heaven you meet David Eagleman, the author of Sum. You tell him you liked his book, for the most part, but wonder if he realizes that he stole “Graveyard of the Gods” from Neil Gaiman (Mr. Gaiman doesn’t have time to worry about this because goodreaders are chasing him all over heaven) and that some of the forty themes (e.g. heaven is so boring it’s hell, people get sick of immortality and volunteer for suicide) have been done before. You tell him some of his vignettes (“Mirrors”) are moving, while others (“Death Switch”) are funny and still more (“Blueprint”) thoughtful. You thank him for expanding consideration of the afterlife beyond our limited western hemisphere mindset. You admit that Sum didn’t rock your world but add that a few of your goodreads friends loved his book. He seems distracted and questions when he’ll meet these people. You also ask where you can find his publisher, since this book (which you got from the library, of course) lists for twenty bucks but takes less time to read than People magazine’s “best dressed” issue (not that, uh, you ever wasted a minute on magazines back on earth, of course not). Eagleman shrugs and walks off. Then you see your librarian with the next book on your reserve list. You blink to your perfect reading spot. You sip from a cup of coffee, all the time in the world, and open to the first page.

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Sep 05, 2011 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, short-stories, favorites, 2011-top-ten, dr-author

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...more

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Mar 22, 2009 Alyssa Banguilan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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....?

8 likes · like · see review

Apr 15, 2009 R. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

Work. Of. Genius.

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Mar 29, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: merkins, short-stories

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 movements...more 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 movements after its time is up, with more and more fresh snails coming until the map gets clogged up with past selves. If you come into contact with any of your previous snail-selves, it’s game over. This raises quite a profound metaphysical conundrum for a cheapo game coded by two nerds. Imagine if we had the chance to live our lives over, in the same circumstances, with knowledge of our previous selves altering how we moved through the world, but relying on certain foundations having been laid in these previous lives for advancement in our then-present lives. Like concentric Russian dolls whose contact would spell extinction.

Knowing we had freedom to live multiple, or endless lifetimes, with the only caveat no touching our previous selves, how would this effect how we try to solve the frustrations and problems in our present lives, knowing contact with people in our previous lives would be limited to the few moments our past selves weren’t in contact with these people? For example, can you imagine how tiring it must be for someone married to seven reincarnations of the same person, having to tend to all their needs like a revolving-door of husbands/wives? How could we stay away from people, knowing our presence there would increase the chance of our own death? How could we order our lives so that our legacies built up over two hundred or so years? What if we peaked in our first lives, and the subsequent reincarnations are simply failures and frustrations?

Not bad for a Yaroze game—normally it’s variations on Tetris or Space Invaders. These clever short fictions posit such conundrums about the afterlife, from ‘Sum,’ where all the aspects of our lives are arranged in order, i.e. ten years of pain, two weeks writing reviews on Goodreads, or ‘Reversal’ where we live our lives backwards upon death, realising we have misremembered our lives, and are unable to identify ourselves in the rewind. These two tales open and close the collection. Using his background in neuroscience, Eagleman pens delightful hypothetical fables, largely whimsical and ingenious. Daintily packaged and teasingly slim, so almost impossible to resist. I heard about this book via this Intelligence Squared talk with Will Self.(less)

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Nov 10, 2008 Sam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Mar 21, 2009 Julie Lauletta rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, short-stories

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.

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Mar 27, 2009 Kent rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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Mar 04, 2009 Louis Cassorla rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Similar in form to Alan Lightman's brilliant little book, Einstein's Dreams. This one follows the thought experiment of speculating on the possibilities of what the afterlife is like, and in doing so explores the notion of what our existence really is. The author has presented 40 such possibilities, each in the 2-4 page range. A quick read, very fun. Philosophical, but easy.

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Mar 26, 2009 Natali rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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Apr 21, 2012 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of Lem, Hofstadter, Borges, Pratchett

Recommended to Mike by: Sadeem

Shelves: religion, short-fiction

Imaginative, entertaining, frequently thought provoking, like getting punched in the side of the head and suddenly lines are bent and squares are circles, for a moment at least, which is about the best you can ask of an author. Some of the vignettes are slightly derivative but no less pleasing for it. Can be somewhat repetitive as the same question is asked 40 times: what if the afterlife is…? However, the book, like poetry, should probably be read in bites rather than a gulp. Spread the book ou...more

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Jul 17, 2011 Hilary rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, short, stories

Does what it says on the cover: forty (extremely short) tales of possible afterlives. These are philosophical rather than theological exercises, and the afterlives in question are exclusively modern Western � no Valhallas here, no Gehennas, no meetings with the Hindu pantheon, or with the Chinese gods, no Elysian Fields; there are Heavens and Hells, or nothings and neithers. There is a Heaven where Mary Shelley is venerated, there are afterlives where we are cogs in a machine (not the most origi...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Ash rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have heard about the author, neuroscientist and philosopher David Eagleman, before because his nonfiction work, Incognito, is currently on display at my local bookstore. However, I became really impressed with Eagleman when he spoke at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he discussed dreams and perception while we watched the 2010 movie Inception.

During the Q&A portion, he discussed Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and it got me curious. I'm glad it did because Sum is amazing! In Sum,...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Loy Machedo rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Loy Machedo’s Book Review – Sum: Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman.

After reading the simply addictive ‘Incognito’, I was desperately eager to read any book written by David Eagleman. And so ‘Sum: Tales from the Afterlives’ fell into my lap. The result – A disgustingly bad mistake of stupid assumption and high expectations getting obliterated into smithereens.

It was so bad, I ended up committing myself to research with the horrifying curiosity as to how could such a great author commit...more

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Jan 23, 2012 Grace rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's an interesting read on a subject that is often on my mind--whether there is a god, who or what might this god be, and what impact should that have on the way I live my life. Written by an author who claims to be a "possibilian" because he finds the term agnostic to be too limiting, Eagleman uses each chapter to creatively hypothesize just who or what god might be. In the end he created a collection of short stories, each distinctly telling the story of god and your afterlife.

For a short boo...more

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Sep 10, 2011 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Amazing.

A sort of theological speculative fiction, examining forty possible futures for after you die. Written by a neuroscientist, dualistic ideas are explored on occasion, but most of the futures draw widely from religion, science fiction, dreams, and or nightmares.

Not for dogmatists, as ideas of God are wildly varied, but the best part for me was the way that values are explored. In many of the afterlives, some characteristics of contemporary reality are projected into the future. If you re...more

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Jun 08, 2011 Vegantrav rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The short stories in this collection (so short that they might better be termed fables or parables) deal primarily, as the title indicates, with the afterlife. Most of them are ingeniously imaginative and address, in a playful way, the ultimate question that almost all humans ask themselves: what happens to us after we die?

Eagleman doesn't write from any particular religious (or non-religious, for that matter) tradition or philosophical position but simply throws out different scenarios about th...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Lyndon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the afterlife, you find that God deals in the realm of microbes. He is on the wrong spatial scale, and has no idea you exist. Or perhaps you find that the events of your life are re-played in chunks according to categorisation - you spend six full days clipping your nails, fifteen months looking for things that you've lost. Maybe your eternal rest is disrupted by the fact that the world of the afterlife only contains the people that you remember; you keep swapping cars and can no longer buy g...more In the afterlife, you find that God deals in the realm of microbes. He is on the wrong spatial scale, and has no idea you exist. Or perhaps you find that the events of your life are re-played in chunks according to categorisation - you spend six full days clipping your nails, fifteen months looking for things that you've lost. Maybe your eternal rest is disrupted by the fact that the world of the afterlife only contains the people that you remember; you keep swapping cars and can no longer buy groceries because you never bothered to commit to your memory the individuals who filled these voids for you.

These options and thirty-seven more make up the various chapters of David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives, perhaps the most exciting work of speculative fiction I've encountered in the last twelve months. A talented neuroscientist and writer, Eagleman throws away everything you think you know about the post-death experience. Instead of starting with already existing religious narratives and expanding on them, all previous superstition is cast to the wind and Eagleman postulates brand new scenarios which we might find ourselves in when the plug is pulled.

The book is written entirely in second person, but as most of the entries are only a couple of pages, it never becomes jarring. It is you who has to navigate the rocky road of your own death, and you who becomes so immersed in this gorgeously original piece of work. The book reads like an instruction manual for those who have shuffled off the mortal coil. Massive in scope, but a casual ninety pages long, it's an incredibly personal and insightful book.

Sum counts among its fans big names like Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman, and deservedly so. It shines and sparkles with wit, beautiful writing and immense imagination. More importantly, like all the best writing that deals with death, it holds strong and profound statements about life too. It is a book wholly and perfectly wonderful, and a book that can't be read in one sitting (I tried, I really did) simply because every chapter is exhausting in it's exploration of what it means to be human. If heaven is real, David Eagleman's wonderful collection of stories better be there.

From my blog: http://lyndonswords.blogspot.com (less)

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Feb 09, 2011 Zach rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Almost all of these brief stories - if they can be called that, lacking, really, plot or characters or any substance beyond the bare concept - possess a really brilliant, original premise. They are possible afterlives, sometimes visions of a possible god, and they explore the ramifications of each possibility. As thoughts, as ideas, these tales are remarkable, and as an intellectual pursuit, the book delivers. As I mentioned, these are not really stories, though. This book is a collection of pre...more

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Dec 02, 2010 Laala Alghata rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” — David Eagleman, Sum: Tales From The Afterlives

Sum was a lovely read. It was thought-provoking (man, I hate using that word in reviews… but it really is appropriate here) and ethereal. David Eagleman — who is by profession a neuroscientist — gives us forty different versions o...more “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” — David Eagleman, Sum: Tales From The Afterlives

Sum was a lovely read. It was thought-provoking (man, I hate using that word in reviews… but it really is appropriate here) and ethereal. David Eagleman — who is by profession a neuroscientist — gives us forty different versions of what the afterlife could be like. Some are wildly imaginative, some are clearly inspired by fiction (Metamorphosis, Mary, Oz), some aren’t ludicrous, a couple are unworthy of being in a book with so much imagination and cleverness. Mostly, though, it is a great exploration and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Among my favourites were Sum, Circle of Friends, Mary and Metamorphosis, to name but a few. In Sum, Eagleman suggests that “you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together”. For instance, “You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, you are agony-free for the rest of your life”. It’s a fascinating idea — it’s the same with sex, and showering, and eating. You do all of it at once, and then you never do it again.

In Circle of Friends, the afterlife is made up purely of people you have met and remembered in your life. You cannot meet anyone else. And although you eventually feel lonely, “no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive”. In Mary, “you arrive in the afterlife, you find Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne … After some questioning, you disocver that God’s favourite book is Shelley’s Frankenstein”.

Metamorphosis is the one with the above bolded quote is from. I found that fascinating. Until your name is spoken for the last time, you are in a no man’s land between this life and the afterlife. Some people get stuck there for eons, because people continue to mention their names.

Those are only some of the ones I enjoyed. There are plenty. It is a great little book, one which I would definitely recommend.
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Oct 14, 2010 Adi Alsaid rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book in a sitting. Granted, I was exclusively writing at the time, so my day wasn’t full of things to do. But it’s a short book, one which is extremely easy to read. It’s imaginative and funny and heartbreaking, and at its end I found myself wishing there were more stories. I already talked about this book in an open letter I wrote to the author, who then took the time to graciously respond. I wanted to expand a bit on the book in this formal review.

The title of the book gives reader...more I read this book in a sitting. Granted, I was exclusively writing at the time, so my day wasn’t full of things to do. But it’s a short book, one which is extremely easy to read. It’s imaginative and funny and heartbreaking, and at its end I found myself wishing there were more stories. I already talked about this book in an open letter I wrote to the author, who then took the time to graciously respond. I wanted to expand a bit on the book in this formal review.

The title of the book gives readers a pretty clear idea of what to expect: forty short stories of different versions of the afterlife. I usually prefer to go into a book without knowing a thing about it; an adventure without a map. And whenever I recommend books to other people, I try to keep them as much in the dark as will be possible while still urging them to read. I hope you can trust me enough to quit reading this review and just go buy/read this fantastic book.

In case that didn’t work, here’s a little more to go off of. Each story is between 2-5 pages, which is perfect for today’s reduced-attention audience. Every new story you read is somehow better than the last, somehow more imaginative. If you like having awesome ideas, this book is a collection of forty awesome ideas that someone else had before you did, and it’ll make you shake your head with envious appreciation.

Among these different afterlives are: God’s a married couple with problems; we’re an experiment for a god that wants to know what keeps human beings together; you’re split into different ages, and all of you live simultaneously; you get to choose what to reincarnate into. And so on and so forth. Yeah, there are forty of these. The craziest thing is that they’re not just the work of a creative, unorganized mind throwing out ideas and hoping something sticks. They’re incredibly well-written and heartfelt, and every single one of them evoked an emotional response, even if it was anxiety once or twice (like the one where you stay in limbo until no one remembers you).

Somehow, the book manages to speak of the afterlife without being overtly for or against religion. I can’t imagine anyone but extreme zealots being offended by it, and I’m saddened by the thought that someone might not instantly see the beautiful fiction David Eagleman has put on display in this book.

Like I mentioned before, I read this in a sitting, which isn’t a comment on the length of the book but rather a testament to its quality. Then I bought it, texted all my friends telling them to buy it, then went home and read parts of it to my girlfriend at the time. By parts of it I mean at least ten full stories. “Ooh! This one was really good,” I’d say and keep reading, ignoring the fact that it was late and she had to get up early to work a fraction of her 50-hour work-week.

This is one of those books that reminds you of the power of books. The written word can inspire joy, heartbreak, fear…all of which you’ll express out loud for the whole bookstore/coffee shop/wherever it is you like to read to witness.(less)

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Oct 05, 2010 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a strange and wondrous little book this is! The concept is very easy to describe―neuroscientist David Eagleman imagines 40 different possible afterlives―but the details and scenarios that Eagleman imagines are delightfully inventive. Each afterlife is described in a just a few pages, but Eagleman’s ideas are so odd and fascinating that you feel like taking a moment after each one to ponder what you’ve just read. After all, we’re not talking angels and harps here! Probably the best way to gi...more What a strange and wondrous little book this is! The concept is very easy to describe―neuroscientist David Eagleman imagines 40 different possible afterlives―but the details and scenarios that Eagleman imagines are delightfully inventive. Each afterlife is described in a just a few pages, but Eagleman’s ideas are so odd and fascinating that you feel like taking a moment after each one to ponder what you’ve just read. After all, we’re not talking angels and harps here! Probably the best way to give you a feel for the book is to excerpt just a few of the concepts that Eagleman throws out there.

From Sum: “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.”

From Circle of Friends: “When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before.”

From The Cast: “…But it turns out you missed the mark. It is not life that is a dream; it is death that is a dream. Stranger still, it is not your dream; it is someone elses’s. You now recall that your dreams always had background characters: the crowds in the restaurant, the knots of people in the malls and schoolyards, the other drivers on the road and the jaywalking pedestrians. Those actors don’t come from nowhere. We stand in the background, playing our part, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer…This is not a job choice but indenture: you owe the same number of hours of services as you spent dreaming during your lifetime.”

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 grave. The third is that moment sometime in the future, when you name is spoken for the last time. So you wait in this lobby until the third death….”

From Subjunctive: “In the afterlife, you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the yous that could have been.”

Eagleman isn’t afraid to play with the concept of God either. In one scenario, God is a microbe completely unaware of our existence. In another, God is a married couple. In still another, we discover that our Creators are “… a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures.” In other scenarios, God doesn’t exist at all; the afterlife is run by Technicians or Cartographers or Collectors.

I just loved this book! It was so imaginative and quirky and odd. I couldn’t wait to read the next idea that Eagleman had dreamed up. Eagleman’s writing is simple and precise, but the concepts that he describes are so diverse―an intoxicating mixture of the odd, mundane, ridiculous, comforting, inspiring, humorous and sad―that I never knew what was coming next.

I’m quite sure this book isn’t for everyone. If you’re pretty set in your ideas of what God is like and what the afterlife will be, I’m sure you may find this book bordering on sacrilege. For others, this book will be what I imagine Eagleman intended it to be: a mind-trip into a time and place that none of us really understand or know. Consider it fantasy or science fiction … but consider reading it if what I’ve described appeals to your sense of curiosity or whimsy.(less)

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Sep 27, 2010 Andy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Andy by: Brian Eno

Shelves: 2010, short-stories

I picked this up in Melbourne, based on the cover and the brian Eno quote. I loved it. Really did. Forty short tales describing what happens when you die. It's a simple concept but so well done and so elegantly composed.

They range from philosophical, deep and sublime to the base and humourous. They take the piss, they're outright funny, they're often sad and melancholy and deeply moving while also uplifting. As the afterlife or lack of is explained in a multitude of ways we're shown a lot about...more

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Jul 13, 2010 Ian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: general-fiction

Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlives is a collection of 40 different imaginations of what happens after death. Although the afterlife is almost patently religious, the tales inside don't follow the typical religious themes that you might be used to. In one story, the afterlife is comprised of different versions of yourself and you face the inadequacies of your own life versus the opportunities that other versions of you took advantage of. In another you live in a world comprised of only the people yo...more

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Mar 11, 2010 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

My friends Matt and Cassie recommended this book to me. It's a series of short 2-3 page stories about different possible afterlives. I have to admit I was a little skeptical at first because I wasn't sure how good they would be if they were so short. Boy was I wrong.

This book was phenomenal. It is funny, sad, humorous, and just downright lovely at times. I am definitely going to buy a copy.

My favorite story is probably one involving our creators being tiny, dim-witted creatures. After you die, y...more

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Feb 12, 2010 Eric Nguyen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great things come in small packages in David Eagleman's fiction debut Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. A neuroscientist at Baylor College, Eagleman, who already hasseveral work of nonfictin to his name, took 7 years to write this 100 page wonder of 40 vignettes (which was originally 70 stories).

But don't let the number of pages fool you. This is a metaphysical literary achievement told with wit, intelligence, and a complete understanding of human nature. Among the afterlives Eagleman envisi...more

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Jan 08, 2010 B. Lynn Goodwin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone with an open mind

What happens after we die is anyone’s guess. Humans just don’t know, but we have the power to imagine and neuroscientist David Eagleman has embraced 40 forty possibilities in his new book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Alternately witty, sobering, humane, surprising and scientific, his tales of the world that might follow this life stretch the imagination.

Is God male, female, or a married couple in one body? Is God in computer chips and is the next world a virtual one? Are we physically...more

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Jan 06, 2010 Dave Cullen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was my favorite book I read in 2009.

Here's what I wrote in a piece for Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/20...

I loved the idea of "Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives," but did I actually want to slog through 40 of them? How many novel conceptions of the afterlife are there -- wouldn’t this be about 35 too many? No, actually. David Eagleman has got a million of them.

Eagleman did his undergrad in literature and his Ph.D. in neuroscience. He runs a brain lab by day and writes fiction at...more

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Jul 28, 2009 Vicky rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This little book is brilliant! Forty tales from the afterlife, each one is more unexpected, funny, sad and clever than the next one - they make you laugh, talk to yourself and look for anyone to share your delight.
Could you imagine the afterlife that is exactly like your past life but everything happened in a different sequence. First, you eat for 30 years, than you sleep for the next 40, after that you chat on a phone for the 25 and sit at the front of TV in a zombie state for the whole 10 year...more

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Jul 19, 2009 ann rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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About David Eagleman

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, a New York Times bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. During the day he runs a neuroscience research laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in the Texas Medical Center in Houston. At night he writes. His books have been translated into 23 languages.

More about David Eagleman...

Books by David Eagleman

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Why the Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization

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“Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.” — 22 people liked it

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