Then she didn't

Well tonight's nigh 10 hours of work were well spent. You see, I went to Roanoke early today to have some time to relax and eat before work. I ended up at Barnes and Noble and, well, I gave in to my consumer instincts and bought the new Douglas Coupland book, Jpod. I had read that it was the spiritual successor to Microserfs (which is one of my all time favs.) and so I had to have it. Of course, it's still in hardcover (having only come out last week) and so it was expensive.

So at work tonight I managed to read the whole thing. That's right, I read the whole damn book on the clock. It's was a Saturday so I really wasn't goofing off more than I should have, I didn't have much to do and I just flew through the thing. Still it's annoying to pay $20 for a book and then read it all in one day.

Actually I had a couple of hours to spare and ended up reading part of another book I had with me, The First World War by John Keegan. It's going substantially slower, but I did enjoy the sequence of events surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination. I knew that was ostensibly what caused the war, I just had no idea why.

Back to Jpod, it was a good read. I dug the characters, but it seemed a little indulgent. Coupland has inserted himself in as a character, which is odd. (Although I can appreciate it from a Charlie Kaufman type of stance.) Also his stories always have these real life beginnings and go random at some point, which sometimes works better than others. Here it's hard to pull it all together in my mind. I'm giving it a foot massage initial rating, but am reserving the right to change it later. (Actually I always reserve that right, screw you people I'll do whatever the fuck I want... ok, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get all hostile, but I will do as I please on my own site!)