6) The Good Ol' Gulag: Martin Amis and House of Meetings

Book: House of Meetings

Author: Martin Amis

Pages: 240

Distraction level: High. I'm into the fourth season of The Wire and so far it's my favorite. (Little kids struggling to get by! The guy from Queer As Folk running for Mayor! It's too much! It's like heroin!)I'm also fighting a cold and a general sense of wintertime malaise, which is not an ideal state of mind to be in when you're reading a novel about Russian prison camps in the Arctic Circle. I should just get it over with already and pick up How Stella Got Her Groove Back or something.

Favorite quote:Gaaahh. It's so hard to pick a favorite from a Martin Amis novel. Even if it's not his best book (and this one is not, Spoiler Alert!) he always packs 'em full of lines full of hilarious nastiness and underpinnings of deep sadness. Witness:

"The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread."

"Zoya was not an acquired taste. He face was original but her figure was a platitude---tall and ample and also wasp-waisted. Every male was condemned to receive its message. You felt it down the length of your spine. We all got it, from the street draggle-tail who pleaded to carry her books and hold her hand, right the way up to our pale and ancient postman who, each morning, stopped and stared at her with his mouth unevenly agape and one eye shut, as if over a gunsight."

And later:
"The great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons."

Before I sat down here at the old computer to wrestle with House of Meetings, I was listening to the Grinderman song "No Pussy Blues." Grinderman is fronted by the incomparably awesome Nick Cave, who throughout his various years, projects and musical incarnations has succeeded in becoming even cooler in his wiry, dirty-moustachioed old age. It struck me (as it has struck me a few times before) that there are many similarities between Nick Cave and Martin Amis. They even look alike:

Mr. Amis:




Mr. Cave




Ahh, the unabashed cigarette smoking, the naturally quiet and British demeanors (and yes, Nick is Australian, but he's practically British in my books), the dark clothes and dark brows, the receding hairlines that somehow remain sexy.
And yeah, both have been objects of my embarrassing lust and fangirly dad-crush type affections for some time, now. I have written love letters to them both (In case you were wondering: I sent Nick Cave his, but never had the cajones to slide my page of shitty, breathless prose into an envelope postmarked to Amis' British publicist.) And both survived a lecherous and debased youth, but grew to retain the best parts of their artsy intellectual backgrounds. Amis was a womanizing literary enfant terrible in his day with a writer dad (Kingsley Amis) while Cave more or less wrote the book, so to speak, on how to be a post-punk and heroin-addicted sex fiend while also writing amazing songs, a novel, a fucking amazing Australian Western (The Proposition) and performing university lectures on the construction of the Love Song. His dad was a teacher.

And both produce their most satisfying work when they stick to what they know best. Nick Cave's latter-year ballads alternate between embarrassingly maudlin and breathtaking, but after 20 years on the road, his renditions of dirty-as-hell songs like Stagger Lee and Deanna still turn me into a blithering pile of lusty goop. Amis' early novels The Rachel Papers, Success and Money are so very, very nasty, full of misanthropic, hateful characters doing terrible things to each other. But they're also just so fucking good. Amis is often considered quite a dick, and for all intents and purposes, he still seems to be one, especially when answering questions posed by fans, but he's also acerbic and much smarter than I am, and he's very good at what he does. So I forgive.

I had been waiting for House of Meetings for a long while. It continues with Amis' latest obsession with mass genocides, Soviet Russia, the facists and the mongrels, or, as he puts it in the book, the brutes versus the bitches. (If you're interested, Amis previously walked through this desolate and bloody world with Koba the Dread, a subjective history of Joseph Stalin.) In House of Meetings he's attempted a fictional rendering of the time period, focusing on two half-brothers who somehow survived a prison camp near the Arctic Circle and Zoya, the beautiful woman who haunted them both.

But it's not a love story, as the back cover of the book seems to suggest. None of Amis' books really are, although they might wear that premise as a thin shell. Nope---it's all about hatred, misery, regret, and some thin kind of survival. Amis' narrator (the handsome brother, if you believe his amusingly narcissistic description of himself as "six foot two with thick black hair and orderly features") survived, but he also ranks as one of Amis' all-time Grade A wankers. In letters to an unseen daughter that serve as the narrative to the tale, the guy freely shares stories of rape and beatings, withering appraisals of his brother, sister and even Zoya, the object of his so-called affections.

Hmm. I'm never sure how to reconcile or forgive Amis' characters. He doesn't write books where the characters possess some innate, highly visible vulnerability that might account for their behaviour. They simply are---and the narrator of House of Meetings simply is. I'm sure surviving the gulag would make me a bit of a shithead, for example, but Amis' character is a shithead before he even arrives---it's a trait that's directly attributable to his survival. I think we're supposed to try and understand that living in Soviet Russia itself made men do terrible things and act out in ways that defy self-control and rationality. This aside, this narrator is the first Amis character I couldn't hang onto. It was extremely difficult to keep holding his hand as he marches through the book's various miseries. I couldn't do it---and I have always had a high tolerance for the misogyny and self-loathing of Amis' characters, because it seemed to lead to something larger, something more, something satiric. But with this guy, I was, for the first time, repulsed.

It also doesn't help that this guy is supposed to be a hardcore Russian and yet he talks like an PhD candidate at Oxford. This is, of course, the undeniable Amis-ness coming out. Amis has such a beautiful command of the language that his characters can't help but sound highly learned (I think the one exception might be the working-class lady cop of Night Train.) This has often been criticized as being a detriment to his novels by critics, and in House of Meetings, it distracts and tortures the reader with wincing, agonizing clarity.

Amis knows he can't match the veracity and distinct vernacular of his literary heroes Dosteyovsky, Nabokov and Conrad (and well, shit. Who can?) which is perhaps why his character name-drops all these venerable authors on a nearly constant basis. To be honest, all the Britishisms and self-awareness is fucking annoying. The worst parts are when the narrator addresses his young, apparently hip daughter directly---a tirade about her generation's tendency towards self-mutilation and whining about her nose piercing made me throw the book across the room. For fuck's sakes, Amis, you're a canonized British author, you hang out with Christopher Hitchens and Philip Roth and you've almost won the Booker Prize, like, ten times. You don't need to make a Bill Cosby-esque comment on intergenerational quirks.

Of course, there is a very sad and tragic story in all of this, and Amis occasionally knows how to bring our faces straight into the gulag and the shittiness of the political situation, kneading us down into the stink of it all. And occasionally, the story rises with a mounting, Poe-like dread that sticks leaden in your throat (especially as the book's climactic encounter between the narrator and Zoya nears completion. It will make you squirm.) But overall the book left me feeling detached and frustrated, and that's an extremely difficult confession for me to make about one of my all-time literary heroes. I left the book thinking, "Well, fuck. Is Amis on a downturn? Is he too old for this game? Am I too young? Too stupid?" To be honest, three days later, I still have no idea.

5) With Dream Comfort Memory to Spare: Barbara Gowdy's Helpless

Book Read: Helpless
Author: Barbara Gowdy
Pages: 306

Distraction level: I was reading another book and got disgusted with it so I threw it across the room and picked up this one instead. I began it last night and finished it this morning. It's a thriller (disguised as a Governor General Award contender) so I automatically felt a breathless sort of compulsion to finish it. Unfortunately, I have to go back and deal with the other book now, on the floor in the corner, its pages akimbo, its spine bent.I've also been busy watching videos like this. Over and over and over.

*Yes, I've used "Nabokovian" as a tag in this entry, and yes, I know it makes me sound like a total asshole. There's a reason I'm using it! The next book that I'm finishing (the one I threw across the room) will need this tag too! Oh....Christ. Anyway.

It's hard out there being a pedophile. That's one of the issues Gowdy explores in Helpless, and as distasteful as that notion sounds, she pulls it off. But for her, the world of the displaced outsider is a familiar theme. In an interview at the back of the book, Gowdy says her obsessions are "attachment, the need for humans to attach themselves to other humans, and how helpless we all are before this need." It all sounds sort of vague and broad until you look at Gowdy's body of work. She's written about an insanely dysfunctional Canadian family with a suicidal matriarch (in Fallen Angels, which remains my favorite of all of her books) and a woman who spends her entire life pining after a distracted waify artist-type (The Romantic) Most famously, Gowdy wrote a story about a woman who is quite literally in love with death in her short story We So Seldom Look Upon Love which later formed the basis of the dreamy and surprisingly lovely movie Kissed (otherwise known as "that Canadian movie about necrophilia.")

Basically Gowdy excels at adding depth and humanity to characters who we might otherwise consider repugnant. Helpless is a novel about mothers and daughters, dads and sons, girl children, kidnapping and repressed pedophilia. And, yeah, it all deals with obsession too. At the forefront is the dilemma raging within Ron, a schlubby vaccum cleaner repairman who considers himself a Humbert Humbert-esque "connoisseur of beauty," particularly when it comes to beautiful young girls. He spies the stunning nine-year-old Rachel walking home from school one day and the wall between his "morality" and his desire comes tumbling down. You might see where this is going---Ron eventually ends up taking Rachel to a room in his basement. In the book's creepiest touch, Ron bedecks it with Barbie dolls, Disney DVDs and a dollhouse in an attempt to recreate the childhood scenario that led him to his love of girl children in the first place. Ron attempts to justify his behaviour to his girlfriend (and to us) by rationalizing that Rachel is growing up in an unfit home with a single mother who plays piano at a bar and works at a video store for a living. Through the third-person subjective, Gowdy then lets the story unfold through the eyes of Ron, his girlfriend, Rachel and her long-suffering mother Celia, who has some mommy/daughter issues of her own to grapple with in addition to coping with Rachel's disappearance.

I was really split by Helpless. On one hand, it's compelling because Gowdy constructs a fast-paced and solid narrative. Her characters are well-written and certainly believable in their reactions to the situation---no doubt in part because Gowdy spent months exhaustively researching cases of missing children in Toronto and speaking with members of the police force about their own experiences.

But I can't entirely say I liked it. And it has to do with Gowdy's attempts to humanize a man who is attracted to pre-pubescent girls. (And it's not because I think it's gross, or upsetting - we should be reading novels like these and talking about them. Gowdy knows there's a line that most of her readers don't want crossed---and well, she doesn't. If you want to be truly horrified by an unredeemable child molester, check out the narrator of A.M. Homes' The End of Alice. Or, you know, don't.)

It is fascinating to see the way Gowdy allows Ron to grapple and justify Rachel's captivity using his own skewed rationality. At the same time, he struggles to minimize the harm caused by a situation that has spiralled out of his control. He's not stupid or blinded by his misplaced affections---he knows this won't end well. He's aberrant, but he's not necessarily a monster. In some ways, this makes his character suffer from a dearth of personality---and there's not a lot of subtlety to Gowdy's portrayal of this supposedly conflicted person. And right up to the book's final, not particularly shocking conclusion, we are reminded that Ron, in some ways, is a fatalistic romantic; not through exposition or his actions, but through explicit statements. I could have used more showing and less telling, to use a well-worn phrase spouted by many of my old journalism profs.

Fuck. I feel like I screwed the pooch with this review, to borrow a well-worn phrase from my grandly and gloriously crass man friend. Okay. Helpless is a challenging book that should make a lot of middle-class people of a certain age angry. Gowdy is the type of author who can approach this subject in an intelligent and graceful way, and in some ways, with the research and such, she's succeeded. But I think she's done better work when it comes to constructing characters who baffle the reader, leaving the book shrouded in a sort of lovely mystery that we're not supposed to fully understand. This could have been her swan song, and instead, it's akin to the sound of a goat yelling like a man---initially it's slap-you-in-the-face jarring, then compelling, eventually tedious and ultimately a bit forgettable.

4) DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008

Agh! I'm already slowing down. Crap.

Book Read DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008
Pages:337
Method of Acquisition: I was in a store called Bookmark in Halifax with Bea on a search for the third Twilight book (for her! for her!) and although we didn't find it, we ended up lollygagging around for a good hour or two and spending money we don't have.
Distraction level:Immense. Work is busy and then I kept coming home and falling asleep.

I enjoy these DaCapo books. The 2008 one was especially appealing because I was in West Africa in '07/'08 and missed basically every new North American release and trend. There's lots of nice pieces in this one and the articles are arranged in a nice logical sequence: it begins with Globe and Mail music guy Carl Wilson and his essay countering The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones' thesis on "the problem with indie rock" and its reductive tendencies when it comes to race. Then there's a nice segue to a piece about how internet tastemakers chew up and spit out "buzz bands" before anyone's really absorbed them. I was going to make some analogy about corn in the proverbial indie-rock turd, but unfortunately I lack Carl Wilson's fluidity with the turn of phrase, especially when it comes to those that are, uh, poo-based. Right.

All the essays are good. Some are carried simply on the strength of the writing. I suspect the San Francisco Bay Guardian nightlife writer Marke B. could write about a piece about pipe soldering and it would still be more cattier, funnier and insightful than most journalism you've read this year. His piece about "gay music"---what is it, really?---had me howling. He's awesome.

The real gems are the articles about musicians whose music I find terrible. Vibe editor Danyel Smith's piece about Keyshia Cole and her rough Oakland upbringing was amazingly compelling. Another standout was Eric Pape's piece about Congolese rappers who live the payola lifestyle in the most literal sense. He reveals how the country's top musicians are paid handsomely by politicians and corporations to insert complete slogans into their otherwise apolitical songs in order to get by in a country that offers them literally nothing else.

My favorite piece was about Sly Stone (of "And The Family" fame) and his reclusiveness and eventual attempts to start playing and touring with his band's original lineup. Fuck objectivity: David Kamp wears his fandom on his sleeve. His excitement and trepidation over meeting the mysterious 60-something soul master comes out when they finally meet after years of tussling with managers and record companies at a Vallejo bike shop. The passage continues:

"And then, like John Wayne emerging from 'cross the prairie in The Searchers...a strange form advances through the wavy air in the distance: some sort of vehicle, low to the ground, rumbling mightily as it turns off the highway into the parking lot. As it comes closer, the shapes become clearer: a flamboyantly customized banana-yellow chopper trike, the front tire jutting four feet out in front of the driver. He sits on a platform no higher than 18 inches off the ground, legs extended in front of him, his body clad in a loose, tan shirts-and-pants ensemble somewhere between Carhatt work clothes and pajamas. His feet are shod in black leather sneakers with green-yellow-red African tricolour trim. Behind him, on an elevated, throne-like seat built between the two fat tires, sits an attractive, 30-ish woman in full biker leathers. He always was good at entrances."

3) I'm With The Band

Book Read: I'm With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie

Author: Pamela Des Barres

Pages: 319.

Favorite quote: When Pamela goes to see The Exorcist with Woody Allen:
"When Linda Blair peed on the floor, Woody said: 'You can't take kids anywhere' real loud and sunk down in his seat, pulling his fishing hat across his face."

Distraction level: High. Shit. There was drinking, hours of "jamming" with my Rock Band "band" The Potent Potables and a portable karaoke machine. And The Wire. Luckily, you can get though I'm With The Band in less than a day.

We're Here for the Music. Really. Pamela Des Barres is the grand Poo-Bah of groupiedom---Kate Hudson based her Penny Lane character in Almost Famous on her, while her mom Goldie Hawn has tipped her hat in gratitude to Des Barres for providing a template for her aging-groupie role in The Banger Sisters. It's important however to understand the distinction between "superfans" like Des Barres and the ladies like the ones who hung out with Led Zeppelin and subjected themselves to various perverse and fish-related misadventures. Des Barres herself wants you to understand that she really dug the music, man. In the book, the music came first and the men came later.

The nice thing about Des Barres is that she really doesn't give a shit what you think about her and she's not ashamed of the fact that she came of age in the booze cans and boudoirs of the Sunset Strip. As much as I sometimes rolled my eyes at some of the ridiculous, flowery passages from Des Barres journal entries (sprinkled throughout the book, they are a testament to Des Barres' belief that she was living in a Very Important Era, leading to rigorous documentation of every last detail) I had to keep reminding myself that this was a very young girl trying to figure her shit out in a scene that she was far too young to be involved in. Through a series of shit jobs, a failed acting career and a musical group that never really took off, Des Barres attempts to find herself in a way that is instantly relatable. It's not just about Creem crushes and fucking. I'm With the Band continally chronicles Des Barres' struggle to be a person of substance. Of course, this desire is constantly at odds with what I imagine are the rather typical concerns for a beautiful young thing; namely, getting famous and falling in love. It just so happens that Des Barres wanted to fall in love with a rock star and did, several times.

Ok. The sex. There's lots of it, although Des Barres manages to balance the most salacious details with nice little tidbits---on one page, she's gaily sauntering down a street in Camden on Mick Jagger's arm, trying on hats, while on the next she drunkenly runs into him at a club, falls on top of him and jams her hand down his pants. Despite possessing a preternatural ability to make everyone from Dennis Hopper to Don Johnson salivate, Des Barres was also REALLY awkward and she doesn't hide it from us. She was also naiive---most of her sexual conquests are quickly followed by scrawled declarations of love and heartbreak in the diary (with a few notable exceptions. Her front-row tease and subsequent one-night-stand with the "strapping" Waylon Jennings is as fevered, sloppy and sexy as you might expect.) There's also nice platonic encounters: her attempts to mack on Ray Davies (squeal!!!) are gracefully dismissed and they become "dear friends" while a series of dates with Woody Allen reveal the director's intense shyness and love of elaborate disguises. Basically, all of Des Barres anecdotes about her celebrity pals are fantastic, especially when she either sees through the bullshitters or gets romanced by them.

Ill-advised penis reference: Despite the dishy passages, there's not a lot of revelations. (Jimmy Page was a pervert and into the occult! Gram Parsons was sensitive and loved heroin! Keith Moon was wacky crazy! Frank Zappa had a very stable family life! No shit, son!) But still---sitting on Jimmy Page's amp while Led Zeppelin regaled audiences in Wembley? Listening to records and shooting the shit with Ringo Starr? For those of us whose greatest musical encounter is mastering "Living on a Prayer" on medium in Rock Band: be warned. This entire book will give you a raging boner.

Consensus: Silly little girl she may have been. But Des Barres also lived through an extraordinary youth that gave her glimpses into the lives of some of the most brilliant and fucked-up minds of the '60s. This book won't change anyone's life, but whether you read it for the trash, the rock-star juice or the coming-of-age angst, it's a fucking great and lightning-fast read.

2) Running With Scissors: Memoirs and Crazies

Book Read: Running With Scissors
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Pages: 331
Favorite quote: "I am paranoid about serial killers. Any of Finch's patients could be one. Especially that crazy lady who owns the Blue Moon Grill in Easthampton. I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained."
Method of acquisition: Bought in Chapters with a gift certificate. Supercheap. Paperback.
Distraction level: Moderate. I am now on season two of The Wire and it continues to suck up my life. Damn you, Bunk! I am counteracting this problem by reading during lunch breaks; this is helpful.

Background: My bookish pal friend Dave passed me Burroughs' story of his battle with alcoholism, Dry, a couple of years ago, with a resounding "bleh." He was not a fan. I read it largely while hungover. It was funny, sad and nauseating. The book implies that his alcoholism is rooted in his undoubtedly shitty and bizarre childhood, which is chronicled the earlier memoir Running with Scissors.

All Familes Are Psychotic? The basic facts (and plot) follow. Burroughs was given away by his batshit-crazy matchstick-eating aspiring-poet mother to her psychiatrist and his family. They are also crazy. The psychiatrist's adopted son begins raping the 13-year-old Burroughs and they eventually develop a relationship. Burrough's father, also an alcoholic, disappears during this time (although he reappeared this year in a sense when Burroughs published the rather tellingly-titled Wolf At The Table.)
So basically, I'm just letting you know that my understanding of Burroughs' messed-up life is all out of order. So what? You're out of order.

The Memoir: Platform of the Whiny?: Here's the thing. Some memoirs are fantastic. We have all read amazing memoirs about people who have lived through war, extreme poverty, police states, abuse and so on. Then there are some stories that are simply so deliciously and magically sensational that you absolutely can't. stop. reading. (The Dirt is one of my favorite books of all time. Don't judge until you read it.) Some memoirs, though, are indulgent and stupid. I am an overprivileged North American, and generally I don't like reading books written by other overprivileged North Americans. They're whiny. The exceptions to this rule are David Sedaris, because his books have made me laugh so hard that I cried, and Burroughs.

Family Circus:There's definitely an indulgent aspect to Burroughs' story. The young boy that comes of age in Running With Scissors is a nascent celebrity whore if I ever saw one. If the young Burroughs didn't have intelligence and talent on his side, he could have been a 1970's Captain and Tennille-chasing Perez Hilton. Thankfully, the man can write, and the story he shares is compelling enough that I stayed with it even as certain moments strained credulity. The greatest flaw of Running With Scissors is that some of its characters are so sketchily drawn that we end up not caring about them anymore, while you can't help but care about Burroughs, his dysfunctional "sister" and partner-in-crime Natalie Finch and even his creepy, pedophilic, manipulative and desperately needy "lover" Bookman. Aside from these three, though, I didn't give a shit about anyone in the book---especially Burroughs' mother. Crazy or not, the woman was a heartless shrew.

The book's style is also a bit distracting as it falls into a rhythm of Sedaris-like vignettes about forgotten Christmas trees and fortune-telling turds. Don't get me wrong---it's interesting and sometimes it's really, really funny. But when these little interludes are interspersed with entire chapters about rough gay sex and lunatic violence, things get uneven.

The true tragedy of Burroughs' upbringing is threaded throughout the book. For me, that's what stuck. Burroughs has a wonderful ear for dialogue and it's through his conversations with Natalie and Bookman that we see what the book is really about: loss, numbness, and coping with the infinite disappointment and fuckery of a truly dysfunctional upbringing. In that light, Burroughs' story is one of Survival---with none of the saccharine or sentimental trappings associated with the term. And it's certainly one worth reading.

1) Jpod: Enough Already

Book Read:: JPod

Author: Douglas Coupland

Pages:516

Favorite quote: "Dad and Kam Fong began talking shop and drinking heavily, while blousy women in their forties, radiating imminent divorce and sexual despondency, tried to get their attention."

Least favorite quote: Some line about how the main character's mom looked angrier than Mr. Burns. I can't find it now.

Method of Acquisition: My boyfriend received this book for Christmas two years ago. He refused to finish it (for reasons I will explain later) and it has sat quietly on the shelf accumulating dust during this time.

Distraction level: Moderate at first. I'm finally getting into The Wire and was chewing my way to the end of Season 1 while simultaneously reading JPod. As most of you know, it is almost impossible to stop watching The Wire especially once you have reached the mid-season point. You may die or go blind. Bad things will happen. I did my best.

Background: Okay. So like most Canadian people in a certain age bracket, I really like Douglas Coupland. In theory. I read Shampoo Planet when I was seventeen and was like "Oh my God, this is very culturally intense and sophisticated and I will never understand it because I'm young and ugly." Then I read Microserfs a few years later and was delighted that Coupland not only referenced stuff that I was aware of or becoming aware of (Bill Gates, Star Trek, FedEx, Riot Grrls) but he also referenced social phenomena that my friends and I already talked about (i.e. the thin fat person.) Plus, it was wrapped around these charming dorky characters and a story that ended up being surprisingly moving. Plus, he was Canadian. Who knew Canadian writers could be so cutting-edge? Douglas Coupland not only gave me an enjoyable literary experience, but he made me feel like I was IN on a giant generational joke; that I GOT something. It was nice.

So what happens when Douglas Coupland seemingly runs out of new ideas and decides to recycle Microserfs for the Google/Macbook generation? You get JPod.

Plot: JPod is very, very similar to Microserfs. Microserfs was about a group of young people who worked in close quarters as programmers for Microsoft. JPod is about a group of young people who work in close quarters at a gaming company as designers. Both groups of characters are socially awkward and eccentric (in JPod, we're even treated to one character's thesis about how all her co-workers display various degrees of autism.) Both books feature pages of experiments with font, binary coding, prime number patterns, stream-of-consciousness rambles and other visual nods to technology, communication and computers. Both books feature a character named Ethan.

Feelings, Ranting: I have no idea if these similarities were deliberate---I'm sure there's lots of interviews with Coupland about this subject and to be honest, I don't really care to go searching for them. Because JPod sucks.

While Microserfs had characters with hearts who actually seemed to be affected by the events that took places in their lives, JPod is static---even as characters utter rapid-fire witticisms and the plot jumps a mile a minute.
In some of Coupland's other novels, these devices are charming, but the level of cultural awareness amongst the characters in JPod goes beyond savvy or even interesting. It's just numbing.

A lot of things happen in JPod---a character is kidnapped and forced to work in a Chinese sweatshop making fake Nikes, someone builds a hug machine, a mother goes through a string of affairs with seemingly no consequence or reflection and the game programmers invent a violent gore game featuring Ronald McDonald. Out of context, it all seems amusing, but in the book each event is just another blip in a series of seemingly programmed plot points.

Cartoon Conspiracy?: For example, the characters constantly compare each other to the The Simpsons. But it's not the way you or I would quote The Simpsons---in JPod, it's done in this very weird, disembodied way that simply doesn't work. It got to the point where I was like, "What the fuck is with all the The Simpsons comparisons? Is this a special Douglas Coupland book code that I'm supposed to innately understand? Oh my God, I hate you!" It's as if Coupland was searching for a cultural reference that would resonate with the younger audiences reading this book, and chose The Simpsons as an afterthought. It's weird and uncomfortable.

My boyfriend gave up on the book when Coupland himself appeared as a character halfway through the story. Yes, he really does, and yes, it is as much a "what the fuck?" moment as anything you'll read in that insane Bret Easton Ellis biography/horror novel about himself (??) Lunar Park. I kept going because a) I am a masochist and I'm determined to finish every book I start in the competition, no matter how shitty and b) I really had hope things would get better.....

Spoiler Alert: JPod's characters are such blank slates that when the grouchy meta-Coupland offers them a business proposition to help design a multimedia globe that mimics and predicts world conditions (don't ask---just borrow the book from me and skip to the end) you almost breathe a sigh of relief that their meaningless jabbering will be focused on a task with a unified outcome. Also, it signified that the book was almost over.

Final Thoughts: Maybe I'm a giant idiot and the meaninglessness of the book is the point. There are a couple of moments in the book where characters lambast each other for having no real personality. I've also heard that Coupland intended to sacrifice the narrative aspects of JPod to focus on the book's design as a literary version of Web 2.0 and some other garbage about ripping off Marshall Macluhan, or something. Either way, I don't care if this is supposed to be art, or some sort of comment on Google society, or Generation K, or whatever---if I don't care about the characters or the plot, then why should I care about the book's "medium" or especially its message? Douglas, Douglas. You can do better.

Final consensus: Boo-urns.

100 Books in One Year

I'll preface this, my 13000th blog on the Internet, with this confession: I'm generally not good at competitions. Houseleague basketball tourneys, NANOWRIMO, 24-hour famines, cribbage---I've attempted all of these activities in competition-based form, and have failed at all of them.

However, after seeing that today is the deadline for Cannonball Read I've decided to once again to step into the precarious territory of the Internet Competition and publish my progress.

The rules are simple: Read 100 books in one year. There's no prizes or anything. Like Nanowrimo (the yearly competition where you try to write a giant novel in the month of November) the victory will be personal. If I read 100 books in 2009, the glory will be mine and mine alone. The rules are as follows:

No books smaller than 200 pages.
Short story collections only count if they are at least 6 stories long.
Absolutely no re-reading. Books you have read before you start the competition do not count.
NO GRAPHIC NOVELS!??

I've amended the last rule because I acquired two extremely weighty graphic novels that I really want to get through this year. But everything else stands. I promise you people I will adhere to the rules. I ain't no pussy. I won't cheat.

This blog will track my reading progress and probably minute aspects of daily-life bullshit (jobs and stuff) that will invariably distract me from my goal. When I finish a novel, I will write a short review/personal study/raging invective about the finished work. I am not asking for pledges, donations or even positive reinforcement. I'm just putting this out there for people who might be interested.

Check me out at http://readnbleed.blogspot.com.

Feel free to criticize, agree, and especially RECOMMEND. I have a shortlist I'm starting out with but I definitely need more.
And if you want to make this a real balls-out competition, the way sports people do, you can join me. Throw down your gauntlet and see if you can beat me. Fool.

Why am I doing this? Well, I had a bit of a rough end of 2008 (I know, who didn't, wahhhh, recession, etc.) I got really sick and two close friends passed away. I'm looking to start 2009 with a healthier outlook. I love reading---it's the one thing I can do. The idea of channelling my favorite pastime into a competition is exciting. I need excitement. So do you. Join me!