#44 Microserfs Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them.

Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.

My Take: I was pleasantly surprised with this book, after reading JPod. It was nice to have a fun-to-read novel with a good message to it and an optimistic tone, rather than the dark humor-filled moral grey area that was JPod. In that sense, this book is more in the tradition of Generation X than JPod was. I think my favorite part was the way in which each character was able to find their own soulmate, who was unique and the right person specifically for them. That's really what love is about---not about finding somebody you think will impress other people, just someone that suits your needs and wants, someone who is what you're looking for--even if they're not what is traditionally thought of as "attractive." 

#43: J-Pod by Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy:  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.

Don't Read It: Unless you enjoy reading about people who seem inhuman, in that they have no sense of right and wrong. I guess I'm just not a fan of dark humor...

#42: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Nina Sankovitch

Jacket Copy: Nina Sankovitch has always been a reader. As a child, she discovered that a trip to the local bookmobile with her sisters was more exhilarating than a ride at the carnival. Books were the glue that held her immigrant family together. When Nina's eldest sister died at the age of forty-six, Nina turned to books for comfort, escape, and introspection. In her beloved purple chair, she rediscovered the magic of such writers as Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ian McEwan, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Through the connections Nina made with books and authors (and even other readers), her life changed profoundly, and in unexpected ways. Reading, it turns out, can be the ultimate therapy.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair also tells the story of the Sankovitch family: Nina's father, who barely escaped death in Belarus during World War II; her four rambunctious children, who offer up their own book recommendations while helping out with the cooking and cleaning; and Anne-Marie, her oldest sister and idol, with whom Nina shared the pleasure of books, even in her last moments of life. In our lightning-paced culture that encourages us to seek more, bigger, and better things, Nina's daring journey shows how we can deepen the quality of our everyday lives—if we only find the time.

My Review: I think it's pretty obvious from the book description why I love this book: it's a book about reading books. How could I not enjoy that? More specifically, it's a book about the healing power of reading, about using literature as a kind of therapy to help you find your way in life when you get lost or find yourself in a dark place. In this way, it differs from the usual "love letter to literature." 

But even more than it is an homage to reading, this book is an insightful and emotionally charged memoir, as well as a tribute to those strong men and women who lived through the horrors of World War II in Europe, and continued to find a way to hold on to their will to live and optimism for the future. 

Whether you're looking for some wisdom and guidance for making the most of your life and living it to the fullest, or you're simply looking for some recommendations of good books to read,  you should pick up this book and try it. You'll be glad you did. 

#41: Cinderella Ate My Daughter Peggy Orenstein

Jacket Copy: The acclaimed author of the groundbreaking bestseller Schoolgirls reveals the dark side of pink and pretty: the rise of the girlie-girl, she warns, is not that innocent.

Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast asthe source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe; eventually they grow out of it . . . or do they?

In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.

I liked this more than I thought I would. Here's why: When I read the book jacket, I thought "a book about preschoolers--how interesting could that possibly be?" But what you realize once you start to read the book, is that all age groups are connected. The experiences we have as toddlers shape us perhaps more than any other time in our lives--they determine to a great extent who we will become as adolescents and adults. Although the idea of writing about "Toddlers and Tiaras" is pretty overdone, Orenstein came at it from a different angle, one I found engaging to read. She talked about it from the perspective of the parents who choose to enter their young girls in pageants--not entirely justifying their choice, but also showing us the extenuating circumstances they experience that might make us more sympathetic to them than the "monsters" they are portrayed as on TLC shows. 

As someone with a great interest in studying the effect of new media and technology on teenagers, I found the chapter about Facebook to be the most interesting. As I've gotten older and seen more and more of Facebook, I've come to realize on my own the conclusion that she came to: Facebook culture creates a dynamic where each child has to sell him or herself as a "brand" who likes certain products. 

What this book, and Back to Our Future, taught me more than anything else is how pervasive an influence advertising is--and how deliberately this type of advertising is done with the single-minded purpose of profit in mind. Advertisers are not concerned with the psychological effects their ad campaigns are having on children, who are at an impressionable age. This is where journalists need to come in and make parents aware of what's going on behind the scenes and the consequences of advertising for children's health and well-being. 

#40: Molly Fox's Birthday Deirdre Madden

Jacket Copy: It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.


IMHO: The beauty of this book is that it captures the experience of being in a familiar setting or looking at an object you've seen before, and being reminded of past memories and people you've known. The many layers of recollection that can accompany such experiences are part of what makes life so rich and beautiful. The pioneer in this type of writing was Virginia Woolf, and Madden continues the tradition in good faith, following in her footsteps, while adding certain of her own touches to the genre as well. 


Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio

#39: Back to Our Future David Sirota

Jacket Copy: Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past.

In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama).

Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

The sources of my ambivalence about this book: Although I enjoy books that try to relate pop culture to other aspects of society, this book just tried a little too hard--to the point where it started to read like one big conspiracy theory. I think he had a really good point about how the messages being spread in the media since the 80s have definitely affected the way we all think about Wall Street greed and the Military. His argument about nostalgia for the 50s is cool, but I'm not really sure what larger significance it has. It's just a random chapter thrown in there that the book really could have done without.