{"id":1516,"date":"2006-06-02T12:02:15","date_gmt":"2006-06-02T12:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2006\/06\/jpod\/"},"modified":"2006-06-02T12:02:15","modified_gmt":"2006-06-02T12:02:15","slug":"jpod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/jpod\/","title":{"rendered":"jPod"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=074758222X&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nOne of my favourite books, and possibly my first Douglas Coupland novel, was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0007179812\">Microserfs<\/a> published back in 1995. jPod is essentially a sequel. Not in the sense that it has the same characters. But in everything else it is. Except that we&#8217;re all older and wiser. Well not the characters. They&#8217;re still mid-twenties to, maybe, mid-thirties. There are six characters who site in the jPod, an area in a Vancouver based games company. They&#8217;re sat there broadly because of a computer fluke that sits people sharing the same surname initial in the same place &#8211; J.<br \/>\nEthan&#8217;s the main character. He has some seriously screwed up parents &#8211; a mother who grows cannabis on an industrial scale and then deals it, and a dad who in the latter stages of his life has decided to become an actor but even in production-heavy Vancouver, can&#8217;t get that speaking part.<br \/>\nBut it&#8217;s the fellow jPodders that we concentrate on: Bree, Evil Mark, Kaitlin, Cowboy and John Doe.<br \/>\nThe story rolls along at a breakneck pace, and I sit there and can&#8217;t help feeling that Coupland has my life pretty much spot on. It&#8217;s amazing to learn, as I did on Wednesday evening when I attended a talk and book signing, that Coupland&#8217;s never worked in an office. But he&#8217;s spoken to a few people who have, and he&#8217;s got it right.<br \/>\nOK &#8211; so I don&#8217;t work in a games company who&#8217;s had their generic skateboarding game bastardised so that it includes a turtle because one of the manager&#8217;s sons really likes turtles at the moment. And I&#8217;m certainly not attempting to build a hidden Easter Egg slasher gorefest starring a certain fast-food derived character &#8220;Ronald&#8221;.<br \/>\nAside from a couple of things like that, he&#8217;s got it right.<br \/>\nActually Coupland himself is a fairly important character. Coupland says that he&#8217;s seen so much misinformation about himself on the web that I think he quite enjoyed perverting his own life. The Coupland in here is a manipulative bastard.<br \/>\nWhen you see this book in the shop you might notice that it&#8217;s a somewhat weightier tome than previous Coupland novels, but if long novels scare you, fear not: there are large chunks of, er, interesting text. Coupland is still an artist as well as a writer, and he enjoys the shape of writing on the page. So when there are several pages of large Chinese text it&#8217;s not just the literary equivalent of writing everything doublespace in college to make your reports or essays feel bulkier. Similarly, when you&#8217;re facing twenty or more pages of prime numbers or four pages of three letter words that are permissable in Scrabble, it feels completely right.<br \/>\nI completely loved this novel, racing through it far too fast, because it could be another ten years before Coupland next returns to this milieu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favourite books, and possibly my first Douglas Coupland novel, was Microserfs published back in 1995. jPod is essentially a sequel. Not in the sense that it has the same characters. But in everything else it is. Except that we&#8217;re all older and wiser. Well not the characters. They&#8217;re still mid-twenties to, maybe, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}