3.5

Mehhhhh, just a book I had to read for English class, it was entertaining but definitely not my style. Whack ass plot tho like wtf

The J could stand for Jaunty. One of Coupland's knockabout books, where again everyone speaks in foolish modernity, and everything's a vehicle to talk about something Doug's read online somewhere. I liked the Jpodders' Parents' weed businesses, and I liked all the pages filled with bumf, giving you the ego-hit of walloping through 500 pages in 200pp page-turner time. It felt like a good palette cleanser for both Coupland and the Reader.

Coupland also has 'Douglas Coupland' appear in the book, in machines and demanding machines to do a couple of Deus Ex Machinas. The silly sausage.

Ed

Si j'avais lu ce bouquin en autre langue et entièrement, ça aurait été la plus grosse perte de temps de ma vie. Sérieux. Encore pire qu'avoir vu le film "My Bloody Valentine" au premier rang du cinéma et en 3D le soir même où il est sorti. Encore pire que avoir joué des jours et des nuits à Pokémon Gold pour le GBC quand j'étais au secondaire. Sérieux. Mais comme je l'ai lu en français, j'ai au moins appris quelques expressions. Pis heureusement, après avoir lu la première partie (il y en a trois), je me suis rendu compte que l'histoire était pourrie en osti (en fait, il n'y en a pas) et j'ai utilisé une technique (japonaise) speed-reading pour la deuxième partie (je prefère savourer un livre, mais là j'avais plus de choix) jusqu'à tomber sur 17 pages remplies des 8363 nombres premiers entre 10000 et 100000. Là, ça a été beaucoup trop, même pour le speed-reading, et j'ai laissé tomber. Comment est-ce qu'une histoire qui se déroule à Vancity peut être si débile que celle-ci? Le protagoniste, Ethan Jarlewski, travaille dans une boîte de développement de jeux vidéo à Burnaby, BC. "JPod" est le nom de son équipe de travail: six geeks (Ethan y compris) qui ont tous des noms de famille qui commencent par "J". Je m'attendais à me retrouver un peu en lisant cette histoire de codeurs qui bossent dans ma ville préférée du monde, mais le livre est plein de stéréotypes et en plus j'ai trouvé les personnages complètement vidés de personnalité. Ils ressentaient pas d'émotions, rien ne les troublait, leurs relations étaient dénuées de signification: c'était qu'un tas de personnages de carton. Même moi, qui connaît plein d'informaticiens, je connaît personne si inintéressant que ça (haha). En plus, la famille d'Ethan semblait instable psychologiquement et Coupland (oui, l'auteur) se met en scène lui-même en tant que personnage. Osti, fous-moi la paix!

When I bought this book, I was with Katie and she was buying a copy of Less Than Zero and I said, "In my head, Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis are the same writer" and she said, "That makes no sense." I think the original random firing of neurons in my brain that connects the two is because they're both vaguely self-hating about being gay, but I've given this more thought and I actually think I'm totally on to something. Both authors wrote allegedly generation defining novels, both love to use brand names as symbolism and both have self-insertion complex.

In the high school of late twentieth/early twenty-first century literature, Douglas Coupland is the shy nerd who's hoping he's going to be able to return for the 20 year reunion a Silicon Valley millionaire with a trophy wife and Bret Easton Ellis is the dreamy enigma who cuts class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym. Meanwhile, they both write books to ensure that these stereotypes continue to exist. Neat!

When JPod was first published in 2006, it sounded interesting and I thought about buying it but it was in hardback and really expensive so instead I checked Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma out of the library. I remember that I hated Microserfs because living in the Bay Area on the fringe of the dot-com frenzy in the late 90s was actually kind of gross and I, therefore, did not actually want to read a romanticized book about it. After Girlfriend in a Coma, I wrote elsewhere: I think I'm now prepared to swear off Douglas Coupland forever. Like Bret Easton Ellis except not as funny, Chuck Palahniuk but not as visceral and, of course, let us not forget, an ending that only Christopher Pike could have ghost written.

(Hah! I was already on to the Douglas Coupland/Bret Easton Ellis connection in 2006 and I don't even think Douglas Coupland was out yet. Actually, with Palahniuk they make a great trio of shifty bundles of internalized homophobia. That's hilarious. In the high school metaphor, Chuck Palahniuk is the guy who gets way too much enjoyment from biology class frog dissection.)

BUT ANYWAY: Somehow I forgot that I previously decided I hated Douglas Coupland and I bought JPod and I really liked it. Which is weird, because it's basically the same book as Microserfs. Two theories: 1) Someone from Vancouver might hate this book because of the way it depicts how commercial aspects of American culture migrate (gaming and film industries) migrate to Canada for the tax breaks & 2) I liked JPod more than Microserfs because I'm Generation Y and so I found the humor more relatable.

Ugh, that second one is kind of obnoxious but probably true. I think JPod was written before the existence of lolcats, but it has that specific sensibility to its humor: something is funny because it's ironic but what's ironic about it is that it's presented as being completely deadpan and non-ironic and so actually it's just absurd. A lot of the things that happened in this book were like that.

Do you think I could pay Chuck Klosterman to write an essay about Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk? Irony would implode.

I'm less than 100 pages in and he's developed a crush on a new girl who hates their office space (and him too), helped his mother dispose of the body of a man who tried to steal part of her pot business, helped his father cover up an affair, helped his brother house some Chinese refugees and dealt with his boss wanting to stick a turtle graphic in the middle of a skateboarding game because "my son likes turtle so all kids like turtles." I like this so far. But seriously, how much more can he stuff in to it?

definitely felt pretty dated. the ideas are still prevalent (corporate work culture, finding meaning through that, a "safe" life, productivity, etc.), but it's all got this tone that is so early 2000's. Porbably doesn't help that there's an emphasis on stuff like XML and software architecture - again, an idea that feels right out of the early stages of the internet. Definitely pre-social media too. Humor that you might find from the tv show the IT crowd.

Coupland's humor and cynicism kind of reminded me of Klosterman. it's not necessarily condescending or bad by any means, there were times i smiled at this book, but the writing lacks a certain subtlety or refinement that i think humor should strive for. it's a book of cheap laughs. 30 pages or so are dedicated to 58,000 random digits, with one "0" being replaced with an "O." The book's plot also operates on a series of non-sequiturs, which I suppose builds on this zany Coupland world of IT, drug dealings, metafiction, etc. but it doesn't necessarily provide for a smooth read.

Also, lots of the large full-page blurbs i felt were underutilized. While it did alter the overall tone and structure of the book, I felt like it lacked cohesion to the narrative, instead only running parallel to the ideas. I did like the full page with nothing on it but "I fucking hate google search."

There are a couple of moments in the book where Coupland scratches at that imperial sense of lifelessness that comes for working for a big corporation. That the characters are just cogs in the machine (i mean, that's the whole premise - a kafka-esque bureaucratic system sticking all of these characters together), but I don't think it's nearly enough given how expansive this novel is. Overall, a pretty easy and reasonably enjoyable read, but I get the sense I would have been served better reading his novel "Generation X."

Es como si The big bang theory y The office tuvieran un bebé y sacaran las mejores partes de cada serie para ponerlas en un libro.
Me cagué de risa, pero a la vez me parecieron re interesantes las críticas que hace al capitalismo y el trato que se le da a los empleados en las empresas del nivel de esta compañía. Ahora que veo los Toblerone pienso en Steve y me da ganas de probar uno.
Estuve más tiempo del que me gustaría admitir buscando si mi número de celular salía en los dígitos de pi y donde estaba la O entre la lista de ceros.
Los personajes son súper carismáticos. Siendo mi favorito John Doe. Las situaciones son ridículas y a veces llegan a ser irrealistas pero eso es lo que provoca más gracia. Lo único que no disfruté mucho fue el self insert del autor. Pensé que iba a ser un simple npc que aparecía unos segundos y se volvió un personaje relativamente relevante. Aún así, me encantó el libro.

There was a time, when, if you'd asked me what my favourite book was, it would have come down to this or To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the two has held up a lot better in my estimation, but I'll let you figure out which one that was on your own.

There's always the danger of taking incredible psychic damage when revisiting something that once meant a lot to you, and that was certainly the case here. Rereading JPod felt like going through my old Facebook posts. Did I really think it was cool to post shit like "Tonight is going to be fucking epic!"? Still, like my old Facebook posts, the book occasionally hits on something kind of funny, like the time I posted "Might buy some milk later."

This is a real time capsule of the mid-00s, but not always in the way it was intended to be, I think. It's kind of a broad strokes reimagining of Coupland's earlier novel, Microserfs (which I suppose I'll have to reread again at some point, too, though I suspect it might hold up a little better), but for the post-dotcom era. Of course, this was also the era of unbridled cynicism, and I think future generations of art historians will look at the 2000s as a strangely cruel and mean-spirited era of art. JPod is a very mean book, with a lot of that kind of South Park 'punching at all sides' invective that ultimately just means giving people permission to punch down.

An extremely generous evaluation would compare it to Moby Dick in the way it plays with form, and questions what a novel can be. A more honest appraisal would call it something more like a novel-length shitpost. Coupland has a lot to say, in theory, but I don't know if any of it's actually interesting or coherent. Irreverent, sure, but at a certain point it mostly becomes irritating. Maybe there's some grand statement to be made in inserting a hundred thousand digits of pi into your novel, but in practice, it reads more like you had a page quota to fill and a lack of ideas to fill it with.

At times, my review of this reread was just going to be a single line like "Dadaist trash" but I ultimately can't overlook how formative this book was for me in my early adulthood. That's probably a Bad Thing (TM) in the long run, honestly, considering how thinly sketched the plot (such as it is) and characters are, even before the author's gratuitous series of deus ex machina cameos. It's almost like a collage, more than a novel. And then it just ends. In a way, I kind of respect it, but in other ways it's exhausting. Like talking to someone who has to be 'on' all the time.

It's strange, too, for something that feels so meticulously researched to feel simultaneously so fly by night. Coupland seems like he knows what he's talking about when it comes to a lot of the computer stuff (of course, that might just be because I know approximately fuck and shit about computers other than the buttons make the beeps and boops happen), but the video game and pop culture references peppered through each chapter feel haphazard at best. When I first read it, the line "a Legend of Zelda pause screen" made me pop, given how infrequently pop culture at the time managed to reference actual video games, but in retrospect, the phrasing is stiff and awkward. Contextually, I feel like the character would just say "Zelda", as everyone does when they refer to that franchise, rather than using the whole title. This is a stupid nitpick, to be sure, but I think it's the kind of structural issue that undercuts a lot of what he's trying to do here in a way that almost feels like Ready Player One levels of "Hey you slobs, recognize this?!" Like, it feels plucked from a "list of popular games" he had ready to slot in at various times throughout the book. When you notice it, you NOTICE it.

Maybe that's the point? I don't fucking know, man. It's still a quick read, but it felt like a slog this time. 15 years ago, I woulda said five stars, no question. The funniest thing in the world to me was artists rudely circumventing your expectations for what art should be (Planet Terror's missing scenes, No More Heroes's ending, etc), but I'm less inclined to find the fun in my time getting wasted, these days. There are only so many hours in the day, and this is just how I spent some of them. Honestly, it's a piece of media I'm probably forever gonna be indebted to, for better or for worse, so we'll split the difference in the rating.

Christ, I recommended this book to a lot of people back in the day, man. Never listen to a 19 year old when they tell you you have to read their favourite book.

laura says: the farther i get into JPod, the more i feel like i have ADD.
grace says: i think that's a rule for this book!

we loved it. enough said.

kitschy and self-referential satire. very y2k in its attachments to the contemporary culture of the time and how they play within office life and politics that don't exist in the same dynamics at the present date (post-2000's)- as with the technological references and general mood and setting in this novel. think beginning of fight club if interpreted by a cynical bukowski-adjacent vancouverite.

the sense of familiarity and nostalgia is refreshing. the read is simple but engaging- there is a clear voice of witty narration. the characters are often very one-dimensional and stereotypical despite being given lengthy points of explanation. i do like the vancouver setting, often referencing local landmarks and neighbourhoods to a stark accuracy even at 15 years post-publishing (ex: west van's rise in gentrification is described as "a rainforest bulldozed to make way for jumbo houses that resembled microwave ovens")

funny but not a typical read of mine so i remain neutral.

I honestly didn't know what to make of this book! A few too many larger-than-life characters, in my opnion, but still an enjoyable read.