Last night I finished reading JPod, Douglas Coupland’s “sequel” to Microserfs. Very entertaining and a quick read. I haven’t laughed out loud reading a book in months.
JPod has been described as “Microserfs for the Google generation”, but perhaps “Microserfs for the EA generation” would be more appropriate, given the setting of a bunch of coders working for a videogame company. I had assumed that jPod had something to do with Apple’s iPod (perhaps a “jPod = ++iPod;” joke of sorts), but you know what happens when you make an assumption. (You make an ass out of u and mption.) As we find out on page 47, the book is called jPod because the characters work in a part of the cubicle farm where each employee’s last name begins with the letter J.
The book was a little darker than Microserfs (murder, people smuggling, forced heroin addiction and slavery) but par for the course for Coupland. Still not as good as my favorite Coupland novel (the underappreciated Miss Wyoming) but it’s among his top best work.