Nose in a Book

Player One by Douglas Coupland

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge 4

First of all…this is totally unrelated to the book but my biggest pet peeve is when the library puts the bar code right over the title or the author of the book.  My library copy of this book has the sticker right over the title.  Why do they do that?  There are lots of other good places on this cover for the bar code that wouldn’t hide the title of the book.  Another book I have from the library has the sticker right over the author’s last name.  What’s up with that?  Anyway, rant over.

This book was really weird, and not just normal Coupland weird, but really out there weird.  It’s a good thing it was short because otherwise I might not have finished it.  It’s about these four people who are in a hotel lounge when the world goes insane after the price of a barrel of oil hits $350.  (I have to admit, as an Albertan whose husband works in the oilsands, my first thought on that was “Woohoo!”)  They barricade themselves inside the lounge and basically just talk and kill time.  Other than that, there’s not much to the book (as I said, it was short).

I guess I’ll start with what I liked.  I like Coupland’s writing.  Even when he is writing about serious stuff, he still has a little bit of irreverence in his writing that somehow makes Coupland’s version of the apocalypse easier to read about and even laugh about.  I actually also really liked his characters.  They all seemed a little lame and sad at the beginning but as I read the book I came to like them all and see the good in them.

Now for the rest.  I can’t say I didn’t like this book, I just didn’t get it.  I needed more time with it but it has to go back to the library so that’s not going to happen.  I feel like this is a pretty lame review but I just have nothing to say about the book.  If you like Coupland and you have the time to dedicate to reading it, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

It is in the future (the near future according to the book jacket) and the bees have all disappeared.  Then randomly (or not as it turns out) five people across the globe are stung.  Each of them are then brought into special isolation rooms to be studied to find out why they were stung and how this information could be used to bring back the bees.  I found this part of the book interesting but then it took an odd turn.  After the stingees are sent back to their normal lives, they are again gathered up, and this time brought together on a remote island and told to tell stories to each other.  Then there are a bunch of their short stories in the book (which I’m sure had some deep meaning to the story but it wasn’t readily apparent and I just didn’t feel like thinking that hard to figure it out).    Then after all that weirdness, there’s some zombie references and then you find out why the bees disappeared and how the scientists plan on getting them back.

So, how did I feel about this book?  I’m still not sure.  It’s taken me a while to get to this review because I’m still deciding what I think.  I did enjoy the first half and I was satisfied with the ending, but the middle part was strange.  And I can’t decide if the beginning and the ending make up for the strangness of the middle. you know?

As always with Coupland, though, there were definitely parts that made me laugh out loud and many of his characters were pretty witty which made for enjoyable reading even in the weird parts.  I think overall it was a decent book and it wasn’t too long or deep so I can see past the middle part (which wasn’t bad – just different and isn’t that just typical Coupland?)

Note: I’m labelling this as dystopian fiction because it kind of has that feel, but it’s not typical dystopian either.