books #54-58

54. JPod by Douglas Coupland. There are many reasons to hate Douglas Coupland books in general, and this one in particular: the many pages filled with chinese characters for technology, fake acronyms, hundreds of thousands of digits of pi etc, the ludicrous characters and events, the fact that Douglas Coupland is himself a character... But somehow, despite these annoying characteristics, I can never hate his books. I did get close this time, though. This book is almost a companion to Microserfs, both of them being set in computer-y companies. What I really liked about Microserfs was that, although the socially awkward geeks spent a lot of time talking about pop culture references and doing quirky things, they had real emotional development and relationships. In JPod, the characters are still spouting the pop culture and being quirky, but they don't seem to have any depth and their relationships don't develop, people are just suddenly involved. Still, I found it amusing enough and enjoyed the cynicism, so I'll keep reading whatever he writes, but it wasn't great. Oh, something else that really annoyed me - you'd think he'd know how google's "I'm feeling lucky" button works...

55. Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes. I know, it's crappy chick lit, but her first few books were actually funny (at least I thought so when I read them 8 years ago) and I liked that her characters had real problems (depression, drug/alcohol addiction). This book is the 4th about one of five sisters. When the sisters were first mentioned, the less involved ones had fairly exaggerated characters: one was the goody-goody, one was a flaky, hippie etc. When she wrote about the good one, all of a sudden, she wasn't so boring, but in this book, she's back to being staid and matronly. This book is about the hippie sister, but of course, that was only a foolish phase and she's just like the others now, too. It was supposed to be a nice, escapist read, but it just made me depressed. I was annoyed by the usual make-up and fashion obsessions and the love story just made me jealous.

56. Adverbs by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket). I quite enjoyed this one, but it was just a little too McSweeney's-ish to be really good (I love a lot of McSweeney's stuff, but I think the style is better suited to short pieces). Each chapter reads like a short story, but many of the characters show up again (although there are multiple characters with the same names so it's hard to keep track). All the stories are about love in some form and while there are many beautifully-captured observations and touching moments, it's a bit too disjointed to sustain a whole novel.

57. Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams. This is a memoir written by a high-functioning autistic woman, describing the way she sees the world and her experiences growing up. I'd read the sequel, Somebody Somewhere, before and been struck by how familiar some of the feelings she described were. I had the same reaction to this book, when she describes her difficulty with revealing anything about herself, feeling like she's separated from the world by a layer of glass and her interactions with her therapist - wanting the therapist to reach out to her and unlock her real self, but unable to reach out enough by herself. I noticed on amazon, she's written another book on sexuality that sounds interesting.

58. Aping Language by Joel Wallman. I watched a documentary about Koko the gorilla last year that seemed to show very convincingly that Koko could communicate in sign language. I read a more sceptical discussion of the ability of great apes to learn language somewhere recently, though (I forget where, unfortunately), and somebody recommended this book. It's a review of all the ape language studies (before the 1990s, when the book was written, at least) and is very critical of the experimental design and analysis. It also reviews some of the literature on language development in children, in order to compare the two fields. The author does not believe that non-human apes have the capacity for language and does a thorough job of rebutting the claims to the contrary by showing that the use of signs or symbols can be explained as conditioned responses, rather than meaningful communication. It took me a while to start reading, because it is rather technical, but I found it very interesting.