JPod by Douglas Coupland Buy at: Amazon

Worst Coupland book ever.

It's the end of an era for me: no longer will I be looking out for the next Coupland book. Maybe I've grown out it, or maybe this is just a one-off stinker. Who knows. There's almost certainly an argument that says the book is funny, and a work of "post-Microserfs" self-referential genius, but I think it's just a terrible book.

The story revolves around a games developer, his coworkers and his whacky family. The mother runs a grow-op, the father is close to getting a line in a film, the local mafia are friendly, and the co-workers produce lists of things. We go to China (of course), and Coupland creates a start-up and tempts everyone to go work for him.

The appearance of Coupland in the book didn't work for me. The 63 pages of primes, three letter words and random numbers didn't interest me, and I suspect won't interest anyone over the age of 9 (find the letter O mixed in with 22 pages of random numbers).

The story probably exists to get someone to build Coupland's DGlobe idea, but you know what? A blog entry would have done the job there.

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