A long-time Douglas Coupland fan (I loved Microserfs and Girlfriend in a coma), I’ve just finished reading his latest novel: jPod. It’s billed as “Microserfs for the age of Google”… It was a good read (meaning I found it hard to put down), but rather annoyingly self referential (Coupland appears as a character in several places) and there are long passages of seemingly random product ingredient lists, SPAM snippets and at least ten pages of digits of pi which at first appear incredibly pretentious (yes, Generation X and Microserfs had these too, but jPod pushes it a bit too far). Coupland does offer an explanation of sorts (can’t spoil it for you though). Anyway, the book centres around the life of Ethan and his colleagues (including a guy with the legal name John Doe) who work in jPod (an outlying cubefarm) for a games company in Vancouver [EA?]. The exploits of Ethan’s brother’s associate Kam Fong, his parents’ unconventional business and uptight boss Steve become fantastically surreal. Despite the pretenious interludes, I really liked it. Grab it from Amazon before they dispatch all their copies to a warehouse in China. Oh and by the way, the website the publishers have put together (linked above) is quite fun too…