#6 of 2009: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

I didn’t think it would take me so long to get to book number six for the year, seeing as how I sped through everything last year. This time around, though, I’m in the middle of revising a rough draft and I’m whittling away at my DVD collection along with reading novels.

For the longest time, while reading Microserfs, I got the feeling that it wasn’t as good a read as jPod. It took me much longer, and some of the concepts were outdated, but when I got to the end of it I came to the conclusion that it might, in its own way, be even better.

The book begins in late 1993 and runs until January of 1995, a period of time where I was slowly becoming more and more obsessed with technology. My fascinations were directed more at word processing, game playing and general screwing around rather than actually learning to code, which wouldn’t present itself to me until around 2000 and in such a poor fashion that I never really gave it my full attention. The characters in Microserfs, however, are fully immersed in the world of corporate coding farms and the Bill Gates deification that almost always tagged along back then.

Wave after wave of nostalgia hit me while reading Microserfs. I remember the commercials the characters bring up constantly, the Play Doh and Lego, the sugar cereal and megacorporations and clothing labels. I remember the current events, the celebrities, the earthquakes and fires on the news. So much of this book seems like it was yanked out of my life that it feels surreal, like pulling memories out of a dark corner that I wasn’t aware held anything at all.

Fast food is addictive but about as bad for you as a bunch of simultaneous chest x-rays.

Apple was, and always shall be, the height of cool.

Lego are impressive, but the claw-like hands on their little people (minifigs) are creepy as hell.

Not too long after this book came out I would wind up owning the much-ridiculed (in the novel and in my life) Geo Metro. It really didn’t have the capacity to kill anyone, or even so much as bruise.

This was like prematurely opening up a time capsule full of VCRs, fax machines, early-stage cell phones, GAP khakis, laptops, processed foods, Crystal Pepsi, Melrose Place and ramen noodles and going “Oh yeah, I remember this stuff. Man, weren’t those the days!”

I’m not going to delve into it in too much detail, but lest anyone think this book is some shallow jaunt down memory lane (or, around its publication, a piece of pop culture masturbation) let me say there is a very subtle but noticeable human undercurrent present at all times that comes out in full force towards the end.

Man, I miss the 90s.

5/5

#3 of 2009: JPod by Douglas Coupland

2009 started off funny and has continued that way for a while.

First I became rather entranced with the idea of using this year to whittle my way through all the DVDs I’ve amassed over the years. If there’s one thing I love to collect as much as books it’s DVDs. I’ve been running on the elliptical and watching movies every day with the dual goal of losing a considerable amount of weight and seeing a considerable amount of movies and so far this year I’ve shed fifteen pounds and twenty-five DVDs.

Not too shabby.

Of course, all of this comes with the sacrifice of reading time. Not to despair, though, because I’ve lost my job as well, freeing me up for all kinds of time-consumptive projects. At this point in my life, losing my job might very well have been the best thing to happen in years, but this period of empty space is going to have to be incredibly short and bittersweet as I try to find a job in this very depressed market while reading, writing and watching movies on a tighter budget.

Good thing I have all this stuff already on my shelves, huh?

I burned my way through JPod in a matter of days. This is my fist Coupland novel, though I’ve been aware of him for years, and I’ve got to say I’m a bit angry at myself for not turning on to him much sooner. JPod is the kind of sarcastic, ironic, meta-book that I think I’ve been dreaming of. It’s almost post-modern but not quite so, caught up in a world full of penis-enlargement emails, lists of pi that last ten pages, missives from Nigerian scammers and concepts for the shittiest video games ever almost-made.

God, I love it. It's almost like reading Max Barry, whom I've already fallen quite head over heels for in a strictly literary-related sense, but not quite. It's Coupland's own distinct voice, completely different from Barry's, but they have the same sense of irony and humor combined with distaste for corporate retardation that gets me every time.

One of the traits of successful writers that I don’t believe I myself possess is the ability to create characters that flow through any and all situations, and the ability to make these situations arise without feeling contrived. God, when I write any emergence of the absurd or grotesque feels so forced that it immediately shames me. I feel like a walking cliche generator, a hack, someone who can’t even conjure the most basic characters or personalities.

JPod is life, the life of nerds and techies blending in with the rest of society, as seen through the glass of a slightly morbid funhouse mirror. What you’re looking at is completely real and mostly true, but it’s stretched a bit in ways that are physically improbable at best. But it’s great, and a blast to look at, and it reminds you of yourself in some kind of fucked-up manner that makes you also grateful at the same time that it’s not a complete mirror of your life.

Really, really good. I’m looking forward to rereading it sometime soon.

5/5


Now, back to Number9Dream, another great book that was misplaced somewhere in my house for a while. Hope I haven’t already lost my momentum with this one.