120 books

#25 of 2012: The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

Give me back my precious time, Douglas Coupland!! I like your books, esp. Hey, Nostradamus, but this was too “experimental” for my taste. It had its high points, like that funny thing about that middle-aged man, Roger, pretending to be the teenaged Goth, Bethany, in a diary THAT SHE OF COURSE FOUND OUT ABOUT, and that genius inclusion of a chapter-by-chapter progress of the novel, Glove Pond, Roger was writing, that (in)coincidentally reflects the flow of the main story, but it had more low points to go on to, like the fact that it tried too hard and became too preachy and boring. I’m not hard to please, Mr. Coupland, nor am I hard to annoy, but whoa, I couldn’t believe it would be one of your books that would turn those two into the opposite.

Yay!s
-“A job is something you can do for life. A job has some dimension of hope to it.” (p.17)
-“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.” (p.56)
-“My dear, the reason we wear makeup is to prevent the world from seeing what we’re like underneath.” (p.116)
-Coupland’s musings about the weirdness of life and death never fail to amuse me.

Boo!s
-I was okay with the he-says, she-says at first, but when it became a four-or-more-way thing going, I had to close the book for a while to yell, “DOUGLAS, YOU TIME THIEF!!”
-That said, the characters aren’t people you’d ever want to be friends with.
-It gets to a point where this actually comes to you: DOUGLAS, IS THIS YOUR DIARY??