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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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17 July 2006 - 10:17 pm
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a coming-of-age story set in Margaret Thatcher's England. This is the best of the bunch, far and away. The premise sounds trite and predictable, but the book hits all the right notes. I picked it up on a lazy Saturday morning and didn't go to bed until I had finished it. It was a great, great novel.
Academy X is a roman a clef set in a NYC prep school. Academy X was also a quick read, but mainly because it was short. Its protagonist was a slightly pathetic school teacher. After giving a bad grade to a rich student, he had to fight for his job. Pretty basic stuff and nothing to write home about.
JPod is your standard Douglas Coupland novel about 20-somethings at a software company. In many ways, JPod was a bit of an enigma. It's long, but its length is deceptive (twenty pages were devoted to printing out the first 100,000 digits of pi, for example). The characters are quirky, but not engaging. (The novel argues that all of its main characters are autistic. This may be so, but it doesn't make me like them.) But mainly, the novel is just too self-aware. Douglas Coupland gives himself plenty of references before he shows up as a character in the second half of the novel. Also, if you've read Microserfs, Coupland's famous GenX novel, you can pretty much predict all the main plot points of JPod. This leaves Coupland with the unenviable task of trying to engage us through minor plot points. These can be interesting at times, but eventually they become too unbelievable. Perhaps if Coupland were ten years younger and a little hipper (in the novel, he describes himself as looking like a TV dad) he could have pulled this off. But then the book would have been called Microserfs. This was the book I was most looking forward too. And it wasn't bad. But it was the biggest disappoint of the group.
So, in summary, you should read Black Swan Green. JPod and Academy X aren't bad, but there are better options out there.
Posted by on 17 July 2006 at 10:15 PM
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