JPod

By: Douglas Coupland

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Very evil...very funny.

A lethal joyride into today's new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland's novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google.

Ethan Jarlewski and five coworkers are bureaucratically marooned in jPod. jPod is a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company.

The six jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan’s personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. jPod's universe is amoral and shameless - and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it.

Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral gray zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself.

Full of word games, visual jokes, and sideways jabs, this audiobook throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. jPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.

©2006 Douglas Coupland

Critic reviews

"Coupland revisits the digital kingdom he so shrewdly depicted in Microserfs (1995) in a zeitgeist-trawling satire about 21st-century cyber obsession." (Booklist)

Grade B Coupland

This is a great audiobook. Couplands wry humor is best played at a rate of speed that you catch yourself laughing and then groaning in self recognition and then move on before any harm comes of it. I loved Microserfs, Life After God, Generation X and Nostradamous. This doesn''t have the timely breakthrough insights of Microserfs and Generation X, but it has plenty of humor and cultural digs. Enjoy.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Software Industry

Feels like this was inspired greatly by Douglas Adams's book, but i wouldn't call it a rip-off, it had lots of originality of its own.

You don't have to be a computer programmer to enjoy this but if you are that'll be more reason for you to buy it.

Very fun listen.

Very Annoying Production

I am not a book reviewer, so I am not going to attempt to speak to JPod's overall tone, story, character development, etc.

What I do want to review is how annoying the production of this audio book is. The printed edition of JPod includes detailed lists of objects, random visual minutia and other hip typographic trickery. Actually, describing it is difficult because I have never seen the printed edition. All I know is that the aduio book features long, random sections where the narrator drones on and on and on with these various lists. One includes 900 (900!) 3 letter combinations which is read aloud for over 10 minutes. Others feature a detailed reading of nutritional contents off an energy bar wrapper, lists of random video game resource files off of a game developer's hard drive (exciting!) and sometimes, just random psuedo pop culture crap is red aloud in list format.

I am sure these elements work well in the printed format where the reader can scan the first couple of lines, get the point, then flip the page and delve back into the story. In an audio book, these random passages of gibberish take the listening experience hostage in the most boring and monotinous way. Whoever made the decision to produce this audio book in this fashion needs to be fired.

Borefest

It's my first Copeland novel so perhaps I just didn't understand his style. But wow was this boring... no plot, bland characters. Yep..

Boooooring, audio production is crap

What disappointed you about JPod?

This is not about "geeks". Geeks I work with are actually smart people. This is about freakish weirdos. This is your normal "work cubicle" the office kind of crap with lots of attempts to include totally predictable out-of-the-way situations that happen to crappy developed characters. All JPod characters are the same and awfully inconsistent. They basically do and say whatever author needs them to do and say to continue with unbelievable and boring story in which ex machina used as the primary plot device.Second part, as all other reviewers pointed out, the printed version includes lots of random stuff, like list of about a thousand of 3-word letters, pop culture phrases, lists of ingridients etc. In audio book this is just read aloud, at some points - 5 to 10 minutes at a time, making like 50% of the book. Incredibly boring.

Mind-numbingly tedious

This is probably the worst Copeland book (and one of the worst novels) I have ever listened to on Audible. It has no real content, no characters, no story worth speaking of and the production is just abysmally bad. All the characters, including the narrator, are shallow, boring and annoying and they are made even more annoying by the fact that they are all convinced that they are so outstandingly wonderful. All of them are the kind of people you want to swat on the back of the neck and then put duct tape over their mouths so that they will just finally SHUT UP. This is all exacerbated by the terrible production -- I don't know if there would have been an alternative to reading out all of Copeland's stupid lists and spreadsheets but if there wasn't then this should never have been made into an audio book.

It's really unfortunate that it's not possible to give a book a zero stars rating. Actually, negative stars would have been in order for this one. A total waste of time and money.

JDull

This book should not have been read out loud. I felt sorry for the narrator and dropped it after the first hour. There's about 25 minutes wasted reading a spreadsheet cell by cell!!! Later I came back and tried to continue... and lasted about 30 minutes before I had to stop. Wow, what a dull book.

Sorry Doug, try again.

Didn't translate well

While I enjoyed reading this book when it first came out I didn't find it translated well into an audio book and really couldn't wait for it to end.

I enjoy Doug Coupland books a lot, but would hesitate to get another one in audio format.

For geeks only!

I'm a geek, so I kind of tolerated it, but most normal people would just skip it in disgust. The author is incredibly self-indulgent. His long lists of unrelated words that he thinks are "clever", which could be just skipped over easily in printed format, are incredibly annoying when trying to fast-forward past them in audio format. The dialogue and characters are utterly unbelievable. Unless you're a huge geek and Douglas Coupland fanboy don't bother.