JPod
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Recommended By
Emily S., siguy, snowchyld, Rebecca Adler, Rachel, Jerrett Taylor, snowchyld, Justin Martenstein, and martyn.
Planning on Reading
deobald, elision, David Wolkin, smellyknee, and iamagirldork.
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Book Details
Written by Douglas Coupland.
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($24.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland’s new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google.
Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company.
The six JPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod's universe is amoral and shameless - and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it. Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. Full of word games, visual jokes, and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.
User Reviews (2) Login or create an account to write a review.
Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Good.
This book is so hard to explain, but I'm going to try...
JPod is a novel about a cubicle pod where all six people in the group have last names starting with the letter "J." It's a glitch in the system that could be easily fixed, but instead the company keeps it. Anybody who gets thrown into JPod can't escape. The last person who left the group only got out because they died.
Anyway, the book is about a typical office environment, with all the jokes, games and e-mails you'd find from our generation. It's set at a gaming company where the members of the pod are designing a skateboarding game that eventually gets ruined by corporate executives. Ethan, the main character, also has a really weird home life that feels a little strange in the beginning of the book, but it kind of grows on you.
I specifically liked all the techy jokes in this book. Some of them I didn't get because I'm not that big of a geek, but I googled them and then they were funny. One such example comes from the last line of the first chapter: "And so the order was issued to make our new turtle character 'accessible' and 'fun' and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: '{101,100, 103, 121}.'"
Seriously, if you're from the tech generation you should read this book. It looks daunting at first because it's pretty thick, but many of the pages are taken up with short blogs, letters to Ronald McDonald and interesting words to google.
Emily S. thinks this book is Good.
I enjoyed this book, although the format of visual art mixed with text threw me off at first. This turned out to be a quick read that I found funny and relatable.