Specify Based On Books JPod
| Title | : | JPod |
| Author | : | Douglas Coupland |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 448 pages |
| Published | : | May 1st 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (first published January 1st 2006) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. Canada. Humor. Contemporary |
Douglas Coupland
Paperback | Pages: 448 pages Rating: 3.69 | 17244 Users | 968 Reviews
Interpretation As Books JPod
JPod, Douglas Coupland's most acclaimed novel to date, is a lethal joyride into today's new breed of tech worker. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames begin with "J" are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The 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, shameless, and dizzyingly fast-paced like our own.Praise for JPod: "JPod is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away."-New York Times Book Review"It's to [Coupland's] credit that in JPod he's still nimble enough to take the post-modern man-too young for Boomer nostalgia and too old for youthful idealism-and drown his sorrows in a willful, joyful satire that revels in the same cultural conventions that it sends up."-Rocky Mountain News
"It's time to admire [Coupland's] virtuoso tone and how he has refined it over 11 novels. The master ironist just might redefine E. M. Forster's famous dictate 'Only connect' for the Google age."-USA Today
"Zeitgeist surfer Douglas Coupland downloads his brain into JPod."-Vanity Fair
Present Books Conducive To JPod
| Original Title: | JPod |
| ISBN: | 1596911050 (ISBN13: 9781596911055) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Steve Logan, John Doe, Carol Jarlewski, Dad, Ethan, Douglas Coupland, Casper Jesperson, Brianna Jyang, Brandon Mark Jackson, Kaitlin Anna Boyd Joyce, Greg Jarlewski, Kam Fong |
| Setting: | Vancouver, British Columbia(Canada) |
| Literary Awards: | Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2006) |
Rating Based On Books JPod
Ratings: 3.69 From 17244 Users | 968 ReviewsWeigh Up Based On Books JPod
...although a lot of the criticism is warranted. that being said, however, i think what i liked about 'jpod' is coupland's healthy dose of cynacism (a lot of it directed at himself and his celebrity) within the novel's 440 some-odd pages. it's also easy to pass this off as 'microserfs 2.0,' but to do so is a mistake because i think coupland's actually stretched himself like he never has before, not so much in form (because it's almost identical to 'mircoserfs') but rather in tone and theme. mostStyle and substance abound here, but I only give it one star because the plot simply went nowhere. Perhaps that was the point, but I still need my fiction to have some kind of trajectory that makes me feel I journeyed *to* something by the end.
No rating: did not finish.Some years ago I read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and liked it -- it was a penetrating look into the lives of IT workers, told through fictional but clearly based-on-life characters. JPod, however, is mere farce -- absurdity piled on absurdity. The main character is the son of a mother who kills a biker and buries the body in her basement; later, with his mother, he holds up and robs another group of bikers. Through a friend of his brother's, he becomes part of an
funny as hell. i laughed my arse reading this.. hohoohho. this is so relevant to everyone working with technology today.
The trouble with writing something so zeitgeisty is that within 10 years your books is going to be very, very dated. Coupland is funny and obviously (was) immersed in digital culture at the time, but the story is all over the place plot-wise and the characters are paper thin. This is all a vessel for Coupland's tricksiness - I used to love his flashy nonsense, but this time I was completely underwhelmed.
I enjoyed this book as I usually enjoy most of Coupland's stuff. But what I really liked are the nonlinear parts of this book that are almost visual art in disguise, especially three rant-ish blocks of Kerouacian flow, in which Coupland nails some dark truths about being alive today and how much the online world influences our individual and collective psyches. I like how he is not just critical of the world surrounding Gen X and Millennial people (like he was in Generation X), but of these
Awesome! This is my first Coupland book - am anxious to read more. JPod follows the lives of five young co-workers at a large video game design company - working in a soul-less, mindless...but funky...corporate environment where they each stuggle with the shallowness of their worklives. One writes: "We accept that a corporation determines our life's routines. It's the trade-off so that we don't have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we'd at least
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