#51 The Gum Thief Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, “aisles associates” at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger’s opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger’s unsettled—and unsettling—life.

Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them…and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.

Similar to: The Office (U.S. television show. maybe the British one too...haven't seen it); Joshua Ferris' "And Then We Came to the End" 

The Part Where I Write A Paragraph (or a few) which may or may not be about the actual book i'm supposedly reviewing and will most likely end up revealing more about me than it will about said book:

Wow that was incredibly post-modern of me. The first time I actually write anything that lives up to my blog URL-name. Yay me! So as you can probably tell from where this entry has gone so far, I'm changing the nature of this blog a bit. I got bored with it. I want a new format that lets me write more... cuz when i try to write a review and limit myself to talking about one specific piece of writing, I end up hitting a dead end pretty quickly. And that's no fun. And very self-defeating. I like to write. So i'mma write a blog in a format that actually lets me write more than 2 sentences. Yay me squared! So yeah I'll talk about that book, but then I'll digress to other things that occurred to me/were brought to my attention over the course of the day. Then maybe I'll circle back around to the book and try and tie it all together. That will be a fun (and uber impressive) feat of bull-shitting. 

So... the book. After reading several mediocre---and some just plain crap---books by Doug Coupland, this was a pleasant surprise. In fact, after Generation X, its my favorite thing he's written. We'll see if that changes after I read Player One, Dysfunctional Family, Girlfriend in a Coma, and the one about the beauty pageant queen. But rather than telling you why its great, I want you to find out for yourself by actually reading it. 

The one thing I will say about it is that the way it has the guy writing his own novel within the novel (and we get to read both of these novels) would be cliched by most other authors, but Coupland does this narrative device justice. Which brings me to random conversation of the day that I had #1: Don Quixote. But actually, no I'm tired. I'll just leave it at that a comparison can be made between the two books in their "meta" nature. 

#50 The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes

Jacket Copy: By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.
 
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. 
 
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.

Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth

My Thoughts: This book had a much more pessimistic view on life than I (and i think most of us) like to consider... and I think that was the point. He wants to shake us out of our complacency and make us question what we're doing, instead of just blindly going along until one day we realize we can't really take responsibility for our own life--either credit or blame--because of how few choices we have really made, how few things we have actively made happen rather than just passively allow to happen to us. I think to an extent this way of thinking can be beneficial, but to dwell on it too much will only lead to being trapped in the past and a paralysis on further action. That's why the short length of this book--in addition to being ideal for those of us readers with rather short attention spans--suits the book's purpose very well. It was good to think about the questions Barnes raises, within the context of this story, and then go on with my life and leave that 2 hours of reading the book where i was deeply anxious but also stirring myself to productivity, behind me. 

#49: The Fault in Our Stars John Green

Jacket Copy: Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

My Thoughts: While this book is darker and more depressing than some of John Green's others, it still has the trademark john green touches. It also surprised me with how uplifting it was; but at the same time, it didn't follow the cliche of being a cancer book that tries to paint an optimistic picture--it was much more realistic and honest than that. 

#48: The Road Cormac McCarthy

Jacket Copy: The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.


Similar to: T.S. Eliot's Waste Land; Joan Didion; Bret Easton Ellis 


My Take: I loved this book. Its subject matter and content were okay but what I really liked was its form. The prose made an economical use of language, using words sparingly. This crisp prose style that is Didion and Easton Ellis' trademark has been given its own spin by McCarthy. The moral questions that the book brings up about what to do when you're in a situation where there are no good alternatives are useful for philosophical discussion. I think that's probably why its an Oprah's Book Club book. 

#47: Paper Towns John Green

Jacket Copy: Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge— he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues— and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.


A Few Thoughts: When I first started reading this, I was annoyed by the fact that it seemed to be so much like Looking for Alaska. By the end, though, I saw that it wasnt just a copy of his previous books. As in his other novels, John Green really hits you over the head with the message he's trying to say, blatantly spelling it out rather than leaving it to the reader to infer exactly what they are supposed to take away from the story. He makes it work, though. In other writer's books it might be annoying, but for him, its a large part of the appeal of his writing style. There's a lot to be said for being heavy-handed with your message instead of going to the opposite end of the spectrum and obscuring your message so much that its like homework for the reader trying to make any sense of what looks like random gibberish. 

#46 Eleanor Rigby Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Eleanor Rigby is the story of Liz, a self-described drab, overweight, crabby, and friendless middle-aged woman, and her unlikely reunion with the charming and strange son she gave up for adoption. His arrival changes everything, and sets in motion a rapid-fire plot with all the twists and turns we expect of Coupland. By turns funny and heartbreaking, Eleanor Rigby is a fast-paced read and a haunting exploration of the ways in which loneliness affects us all.


My Thoughts: The thing that's stuck out to me as a pattern as I read more and more Douglas Coupland is that he likes to explore that loneliness that overtakes you when you grow up and leave "home"--that struggle to ever really find a place that you can call home and people you can call family again. He writes about how finding other people in a similar situation and bonding with them over trivialities of pop culture and the ironies and tragedies of modern life (dysfunctional families, one night stands, etc.) can be the best way to feel less alone. 


Similar to: Don DeLillo's White Noise

#45: Shampoo Planet Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide -- those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens." Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.

This six-month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultra-modern Seattle, and finally back home. On the way we meet a constellation of characters, among them: Jasmine, Tyler's Woodstock mom; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; "Princess Stephanie," Tyler's European summer fling; and Anna Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder.

Tyler's dizzying journey into the contemporary psyche -- a voyage full of rock videos, toxic waste, french-fry computers, and clear-cut forests -- is a spellbinding signature novel for a generation coming of age as the millennium comes to a close.

Recommended if you enjoyed: Pynchon's Vineland; Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero; Nabokov's Lolita

Why?: As the late Richard Rorty liked to say of Lolita, the thing that these novels have in common is that they serve a vital purpose in that they make us aware of the cruelty that we ourselves are capable of. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler ends up committing an act of cruelty and then not being quite sure how or why it happened. He has always thought of himself as a good person, and is forced to re-evaluate his initial estimation of himself after this life-defining moment.