I just chose this as my favorite book in the 30 Days Book Challenge on Facebook, so I might as well review it, even though "favorite book" is a nebulous distinction at best and "what's your favorite book?" is a stupid fucking question and I am afraid this might be a sentimental favorite more than anything else.So yeah, I read this when I was 14 or 15. I bought it because it had a neat mirror cover with a Lego man. I didn't know Douglas Coupland was the voice of a generation, and anyway, it wasn't even MY generation. I was a dorky high school kid, but not dorky in any way much connected to computer programming, so there was no reason for me fall for a book about a bunch of cynical Microsoft employees living in pre-tech boom Silicon Valley.But I loved it. I read and re-read it through high school and college. It is a super-dated '90s time capsule now, but it felt entirely new and fresh to me back then, and in many ways, it predicted how technology and the internet would explode all over our lives by the end of that decade. It's also basically like reading someone's LiveJournal or blog -- the book takes the form of a digital journal kept by the narrator -- which wasn't something you could just do back then. It isn't just the diary entries that tell the story, it's the everything else: run-downs of dream Jeopardy! categories for all of the characters, musings on pop culture minutia like the sociological messages communicated by various cereal mascots [Cap'n Crunch -- Reasons this cereal is decadent: a) Colonialist exploiter pursues naive Crunchberry cultures to plunder. b) Drunkenness, torture and debauchery implicit in long ocean cruises.] Lots of lists. Lots of navel-gazing.It was what I imagined being an adult would be like: working at a job you felt ambivalent about with a bunch of people who became your closest friends, sharing inside jokes and slowly gathering the wisdom that comes with age. I was too introverted in college and made the mistake of living alone, and I would read this and yearn for that kind of connection and camaraderie. Sappy, I know.I haven't read it since at least 2005, right after I picked up a paperback to replace the hardcover copy that I had read into tatters (the only book I have ever done that for). I have fond memories of the characters, I remember the whole plot, I still reference sections randomly (most often this part about how different parts of your body store emotional pain). I kind of never want to read it again. I might hate it: I certainly haven't read a Coupland book since that was a quarter as endearing (and I read a lot of them before I realized I was chasing the dragon). It is self-conscious and twee and post-modern and has a bunch of different fonts and, like, entire pages filled with a single word or random nonsense or ones and zeroes or no vowels, followed by all vowels. It is big and sloppy and emotional and I don't know if I am still big and sloppy and emotional enough to love it liked I used to.Sure, favorite book. Why not.Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 1: Favorite book.
