E-audiobook
JPod a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 9781415951095 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
- ISBN: 1415951098 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
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Physical Description:
electronic
electronic resource
remote - Publisher: Santa Ana, CA : Books on Tape, 2006.
Content descriptions
| General Note: | Downloadable audio file. Title from: Title details screen. Unabridged. Duration: 13:47:02. |
| Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Marc Cashman. |
| System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console Requires OverDrive Media Console (file size: 198168 KB). Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Electronic games industry -- Fiction Computer games -- Fiction |
| Genre: | DOWNLOADABLE AUDIOBOOK. Humorous fiction. Audiobooks. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- AudioFile Reviews : AudioFile Reviews 2006 December/January 2007
In his quasi-sequel to MICROSERFS, Copland tells the story of six co-workers at a Vancouver video game development company. They long to leave their jobs after completing the latest game, but before they can do that, they find themselves at a dead end. The JPod crew play juvenile tricks on one another in a game of one-upmanship. Marc Cashman reads all the spam email in an uninflected voice that adds to the satire of the story. Special bright spots are Ethan's biker-killing mother and wannabe- actor father, who add humor that edges into slapstick. If you like computer geek novels, you'll smile over the absurdity of all this. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine - Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2006 April #2
No, "JPod" is not the next version of iPod; it refers to a group of geeks with last names starting with J cubicled together in a distant quadrant of a giant Vancouver video-game corporation. Coupland revisits the digital kingdom he so shrewdly depicted in Microserfs (1995) in a zeitgeist-trawling satire about twenty-first-century cyber obsession. JPoder Ethan Jarlewski narrates in deadpan geekspeak, reporting on life in gamer land, where he and his fellow designers--each precocious, cynical, oddball charming, and possibly a touch autistic--invent hilariously clever trivial pursuits to avoid work. But Ethan is often distracted from fun with porn sites, math problems, and an evil cyber version of Ronald McDonald by the crazy demands of his off-the-charts family. There's a South Park edginess and surrealism to the frequently violent escapades of Ethan's actor-wannabe father, gun-toting and pot-growing mother, and real-estate salesman brother, who gets them all entangled with the gangster Kam Fong. As both actual and cyber mayhem crest, Coupland, himself a character in this rampaging comedy, reminds us that no matter how seductive the virtual realm is, it is real life that requires our keenest attention. ((Reviewed April 15, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2006 February #2
Bored and zany computer programmers think of themselves as characters in a Douglas Coupland novel. The young video-game designers portrayed here resemble the nerds in Microserfs (1995), and their spokesman-narrator has relatives who recall the eccentrics in All Families Are Psychotic (2001). Assigned to the same corporate pod because their names end in "J," the Vancouver six hate the video game they're producing, called "BoardX," use their modest creativity in time-wasting foolery and decide to sabotage the game by encoding in it a crazed Ronald McDonald. Twentysomething narrator Ethan has "respite" from the laborious weirdness of work by tending to his wacky family-a ballroom-dancing father obsessed with having a speaking part in a movie, a marijuana-growing mother whom Ethan helps bury a body, a brother who sells mansions to Chinese gangsters. At one point, Coupland enters the novel as a character and contracts for the rights to the other characters' lives for, ultimately, this novel. The book itself has a game-like quality: Randomly scattered through the text in various formats and fonts are mock advertisements, quizzes, product placements, interviews and lists-many, many lists, including iterations of the number pi and 58,894 random numbers (both sets of lists go on for pages). It's hard to believe there are enough cubicle clones and bored gamers to give Coupland an audience, but it's even harder to imagine anyone else reading more than a hundred pages of this novel."J" is for juvenile, jaundiced, joyless, jumbled junk. Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2006 February #3
Coupland returns, knowingly, to mine the dot-com territory of Microserfs (1996)--this time for slapstick. Young Ethan Jarlewski works long hours as a video-game developer in Vancouver, surfing the Internet for gore sites and having random conversations with co-workers on JPod, the cubicle hive where he works, where everyone's last name begins with J. Before Ethan can please the bosses and the marketing department (they want a turtle, based on a reality TV host, inserted into the game Ethan's been working on for months) or win the heart of co-worker Kaitlin, Ethan must help his mom bury a biker she's electrocuted in the family basement which houses her marijuana farm; give his dad, an actor desperately longing for a speaking part, yet another pep talk; feed the 20 illegal Chinese immigrants his brother has temporarily stored in Ethan's apartment; and pass downtime by trying to find a wrong digit in the first 100,000 places (printed on pages 383-406) of pi. Coupland's cultural name-dropping is predictable (Ikea, the Drudge Report, etc.), as is the device of bringing in a fictional Douglas Coupland to save Ethan's day more than once. But like an ace computer coder loaded up on junk food at 4 a.m., Coupland derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters. Call it Microserfs 2.0 . (May)
[Page 130]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
