I like this book quite a bit. It tells the story of three nomad type characters who all find themselves in Montreal in the 90s.

Though I found the characters a little hard to keep track of, I did like catching little hints at how they were connected (some knowledge of Montreal may help in this regard), and I liked following their stories. I found both Noah and Joyce quite endearing, Noah for his childhood and connection to his mother, Joyce for her odd ambitions. The third character never quite settled in my mind, but he only made rare appearances. Strangely, the namesake of the book made very little appearance either, except as one of those interesting threads that connect people.

I’ve often thought that the real test of the quality of a book is how much I remember a year or so later. There isn’t a lot in the way of story—I’d be hard pressed to say what actually happens over the course of the book even now, a day after finishing it—but at the same time I don’t feel like there was really any plot missing. What will stick in my mind for a while is that image of Noah in a room by himself, pouring over a map wondering where his mother is, and another of Joyce dressed in black, “fishing” in the business district of Montreal.

The only bad thing about the book was that it felt slightly unfinished. I wanted there to be more resolution than there was, some recognition between the three characters. Something explicit along the lines of a tearful reunion (not that any of them had been united in the past) would have been out of place, but something subtle, a spark of realization in at least one of them, might have sealed things nicely. Although, I must admit, the Three Headed Book and the scene at Newark came pretty close to being exactly that.

Oh, the other thing I didn’t like was the whole bit with Venezuela. It stuck out a bit from the rest of the book.

Still, the book had a nice mood with characters I felt connected to, in a setting I can picture quite well. It was definitely a good read, and I’m not sure how I might compare it to Fall on Your Knees, which I also liked. They are two very different books. I will have to mull that over a bit, and let myself be swayed by the advocates when Canada Reads airs.

This is the second in what will hopefully be a series of 5 posts on this year’s Canada Reads books. The other posts are here: Generation X, Fall on Your Knees, The Jade Peony, and Good to a Fault.

The one that is not in the mail is Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. The reason for that is that I’ve read Coupland’s stuff before. About 1/3 of a novel. That was enough at the time, so I wasn’t anticipating I’d really want this one—despite being so famous—on my bookshelf.

So clearly I had a bias going into it. I really, really tried to give it a fighting chance. Whether it was able to step out of the shadow of stink left by its sibling or not I can’t say for sure, because if it did it cast enough of its own shadow that I couldn’t finish this one either.

First, the superficial. The format for this book was not an appealing one. The first page of every chapter has, inexplicably, a dull grey square in the middle of the text which seems to serve no purpose whatsoever aside from making the reader jump across the page to finish each line. In order to maintain this frame of text around the meaningless grey, there are no paragraph breaks on these pages. Oh, there are paragraphs, denoted by that funny P symbol, but no hard returns. This shouldn’t be a reason for disliking the book—good writing should trump bad typesetting—but in the end it just kept reminding me how much I wasn’t enjoying myself reading it. Someone was trying to be clever and innovative and fell flat on their face. Not unlike the prose itself.

A lot of the space of the large square pages are used for oversized margins, occasionally filled with glossary type definitions, bad cartoons, and big bold slogans like “eroticize intelligence”, “reinvent the middle class”, and “you are your own sex”. I don’t know if this was something Coupland wanted, or if this is again the publisher overstepping bounds. If anything Coupland wrote might have been considered a smart turn of phrase, it is immediately sullied by having it explained in the margins. This isn’t Romeo & Juliet and I’m not in grade 9. Who thought it would be good to reproduce that experience. And does every sentence need italicized syllables to force emphasis? “Pllll-eeze.”

But what these sidenotes really do is highlight the attitude in the story that I find wholly distasteful. The characters are smug, self-righteous, and aimless. They seem to loathe everything about the world around them and they feel so superior because of it. Everything to them is “artificial” and everything deserves mocking. Half the time I found myself wanting to yell “what does that even mean?” at them. It’s this kind of vacuous bitching that airhead reality show stars tend to throw around behind everybody else’s backs. Each one of those bold face slogans—”Stop History” or “Bench Press Your I.Q.”—and chapter titles—”Puchased Experiences Don’t Count”—is completely devoid of meaning to me. Why am I even reading this tripe?

So eventually I had enough of the mind-numbing idiocy and decided to skim through the rest. I picked out passages here and there and didn’t come across anything that indicated anything interesting happened down the line. There was something about a nuclear bomb at the end but by that point the characters had pretty much sucked the life out of me and I left about as apathetic as they were. I’m hoping this one is voted out on the first day.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of 5 posts on this year’s Canada Reads books. The other posts are here: Nikolski, Fall on Your Knees, The Jade Peony, and Good to a Fault.

So I broke out my spreadsheet program and worked it out. I assumed you always get the minimum number of coins (e.g., one quarter and one nickel instead of three dimes), and that each value from $0.00 to $4.99 has equal probability of turning up. This second assumption is the one I’m least sure of, as pricing practices and the effect of taxes may favor an uneven distribution. But that’s a project for another day.

The results are that for any transaction, you should expect to get:

• 0.8 toonies *
• 0.4 loonies *
• 1.5 quarters
• 0.8 dimes
• 0.4 nickels
• 2.0 pennies

I basically used brute force because copy-and-paste is easy, but the same patterns that make copy-and-paste easy mean you don’t really need brute force, and I could probably have done it all in my head. For pennies, you’ll get 1, 2, 3, 4, or 0, and then the pattern repeats. So from just 5 transactions, you can already tell that the average for pennies will be (1+2+3+4+0)/5=2. Loonies are used only for values in the 1 and 3 dollar ranges, and none for 0, 2, and 4, so the average will be (0+1+0+1+0)/5=0.4. The rest are left as an exercise for the reader.

I would have thought I’d run out of penny rollers first. I guess the coin roller people compensated for that but not the rest. When I go buy a new bag I’m going to check what the ratio of denominations is. ‘Cause I’m a dork like that.

—

* For American folk, replace “loonie” and “toonie” with “one dollar bill” and “the two dollar bill you should have”. With only a one dollar bill, they’re just like pennies—you should expect two every single goddamn time. With a two dollar bill, you’d average just over one bill per transaction. Sure you could use that logic to argue for 3 and 4 dollar bills too, but let’s not get crazy.

I don’t need to drink or be loud and rowdy or laughing and shouting and all that to be having fun. That’s what tends to confuse extroverts. At a party I may be a wallflower, sitting to the side chatting with a friend or two, and it may not look like much but I am enjoying myself. In fact, I sometimes fall prey to the opposite assumption: I see extroverts as social butterflies, flitting from one person to the next, without ever actually getting to know anybody or experiencing any sort of conversation. But I digress.

It is to my detriment sometimes. I avoid house parties and other large gatherings in general, unless I know I have some friends to stick to. But when there’s nobody I know (or the people I do know are more extroverted types who run off and chat up the whole room), it tends to be awkward and boring. Even things I really want to do, I tend to shy away from. I don’t mean lectures or a spin class or something, but purely social events, where if I don’t know anybody it’s the extroverts and introverts who already know other people who run the show, and I’m hide on the sidelines.

It’s a classic, cliche picture, of standing outside in the cold, looking through the window and seeing people sitting around a table laughing and having a good time. Why don’t I go inside? Why do I just walk by, home to my comfort zone? It’s a terrible way to meet people, this. I’m worse than Marigold.

I had fun hacking together various parts of this site, but it made it very difficult to keep current. This was especially true when it came to moving more and more content to WordPress. I customized so much with my theme and various plugins that it became impossible to keep up to date. WordPress upgrades itself automatically quite wonderfully, but it doesn’t upgrade all my code. I began to get worried that my hacks would start to break as WordPress changed.

And besides all that, I was wondering what the point of it all was. Nobody comes to this site and browses around, so all the navigation tools and indices of content and whatnot were useless. I had things promoting content on other parts of the site. All this stuff is useless. When people come here, they typically do it for one article they found from Google and that’s it. And that’s fine, because I never actually intended this to be some kind of destination. There’s no social networking here. This isn’t a high traffic blog. I don’t have a dedicated audience or even a well defined subject.

And that’s fine for me. I’ve said all along, that this site is for me. It really is more like a personal journal that I come back to read once in a while than anything else. And if people find useful or interesting things written in here, then that’s great too, but I’m not going to try to dedicate this site to an audience that doesn’t exist. What I got by doing that was a half-breed kind of site. Something that was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

And so I’ve reworked the site’s design. Yes, writing my own theme doesn’t solve much of the first problem of keeping code up to standard, but at least I’ve written it in a more recent standard. In a couple years I’ll probably be ready for a change again anyway. The goal is, and will be, to keep it simple. One of the best sites I’ve ever seen was also the simplest. I’m aspiring to that. The content is still all there, but I’m not trying to throw it at every body who browses by. You get what you ask for: the one page you ask for, and nothing else, unless you really poke around.

It’s much more personal this way.

And from the other side:

It was all the more delicious for the effort. It’s great being home at Christmas, when food just keeps reappearing in the kitchen no matter how much you play with it.