Sunday, June 01, 2008

Why Jpod is the worst book I have ever read

I picked up Jpod in Mexico city as the only second hand book on the hostels shelf that was published more recently than 1954. It is an easy read, but a thoroughly shite one. I imagine it would impress people of Alan Greenspans age and higher in its observations of modern society.
Let me sum it up for you:
The Novel written by a 16 year old after they got all excited about fightclub.
In Canada aparantly McDonalds and Simpsons are still the most culturally relevent pieces of pop culture of our times.
The back cover says 'Deals with the developments of the modern era, including the rise of China and Marijuana Grow Ops' turns out this is more or less all it deals with.
Every character is a comedian.
There are lots of filler pages, eg, reprints of spam, warning labels and 200,000 decimal places of pi, which whilst having artistic merit make the book chunkier than it needs to be.
It just scrapes at mildly amusing.
It alludes to Kurt Vonnegut's work 'Cat's Cradle' at one point, however Vonnegut advocated giving the reader one character to root for in his writing rules. A character you actually want to succeed is notably absent from this book.
I wouldn't wipe my arse with these pages.

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