felis_ultharus

Happy (belated) Midsummer/Solstice/Litha to those who celebrate it, and happy first day of summer to those who don't.

I did my usual high-speed catch-up on LJ. Which is why some of you have spammed inboxes today :)

I keep meaning to review books I have in an ever-growing stack on my desk. One that really deserves more than the short shrift it's going to get is Douglas Coupland's Generation A. I believe this to be his best book. In fact it pretty much gathers together the best of his other work in one delicious, richly-written piece, and leaves the dross. So if you only ever read one Coupland, this is it.

It's a short, simple novel of a likely dystopian future - one where "Colony Collapse Disorder" has wiped out the bee population. Most flowers are dead. Most kinds of fruit are rare delicacies. As the novel progresses, the dystopia deepens, and even worse horrors are in the offing.

In the midst of this, five strangers are stung by the supposedly-extinct bee. They're isolated, studied, and strangely become friends. They wind up on Haida Gwaii, where they start to piece together the mystery of what happened to them, to figure out how they got there and where they're going.

After years of mid-quality and poor-quality efforts, Coupland's more than back in form with this one. He restricts his obsession with ripping plotlines from the headlines to just the bee extinction, so it doesn't feel like he's just cribbing Yahoo News to flesh out his books. The iciness and callousness of his later work isn't here. This one is sensitive, intelligent, and the themes and plot and character are all rich and engaging.

More than that I couldn't say without giving too much away. Except that it's highly recommended.

So in the vein of reviewing books, I don't think I ever talked about The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland - though I finished it months ago.

I liked it. I was told it was his best book in years, and that's true, though it's really two books. The first is an epistolary novel about a washed-up middle-aged man and the daughter of an old high-school friend of his who both work at Staples. The other novel is the one the main character is writing - a story called Glove Pond, about the world's worst dinner party (the name is the first thing he Googled that came up with no real hits).

( Review continues )

In other news, there's a lot to look forward to this month - starting with return from em_fish and sassysairs from Down Under, crossing both date line and seasonal divide to return home after the better part (or really, the worse part) of a year. I'm looking forward to seeing them again ^_^

I've been on a bit of a reading binge this week. I've finished two books and I'm about to finish a third, which is rare since I'm a slow reader.

It's helped that they've been entertaining.

On that note, I just finished JPod by Douglas Coupland, a book set in the video game industry. On the level of pure entertainment, I think it's one of the funniest books ever written.

And it's got all the Coupland strengths -- brilliantly-crafted, well-defined quirky characters, easy prose, and highly original figurative language. Also, Coupland is one of the few novelists who can actually write an office environment well, probably because he's one of the few who's been there.

But I found as I got farther into it that I began recommending it to fewer and fewer people. The book has some serious flaws.

The first of these is the filler. Most of this is built around the games played around the office as part of their daily procrastination -- "Write a love letter to Ronald Mcdonald" or "Write an ad for yourself on eBay." Those two were funny. But when they play pick-out-the-one-non-prime-number-in-ten-pages-of-primes or find-the-one-wrong-digit-of-pi-calculated-to-ten-million-digits -- and actually reproduce those numbers -- I honestly wonder if he was just trying to up his page count.

The second is that his knowledge of organized crime seems to come entirely from TV news reports. Even I could tell that.

But the worst problem by far is the Mary-Suing. And yes, it still counts as being a Mary Sue if you insert yourself into your novel as a sociopathic monster, especially if you're an evil business genius, though I admit I laughed out loud when the narrator described the experience of looking into Coupland's "cold, dead eyes" as like looking into "a well of drowned toddlers."

Again, it's still worth the read, especially if you're looking for something easy and not too serious, and if you like video games. But I'm disappointed because he used to be so interesting. Coupland used to be finding soul and beauty into the the unlikeliest corners of the modern world. Now he's tipped over the ledge of postmodernism, and doesn't seem to care.

The world celebrated in JPod is the shallow and empty world Margaret Atwood's Crake destroys in Oryx and Crake. I kept expecting the characters to be popping BlyssPluss.