John’s Blog

I made a serious error in rereading these books. I don’t know why I picked them up — I remember devouring them as a kid — the same feeling I had when I first read The Hobbit (or later LOTR) or Ender’s Game.

Well, they say you can’t go home again, and I think that holds true for some of my favorite childhood books — reading them as an adult, they’re practically unreadable — I mean, there is so much in them that is awful. I’m still a bit of a sucker for giant mythologies, so liked that part, but man, tough to read, and I think I wish I had left the memory in place.

Sometime maybe I’ll do a post on the most influential books I read growing up — there are certain books that I can vividly remember where I was and what was happening as I read them. Some were great, some not so much. But they all contribute in some way to my world view now.

Since I read this two book series back-to-back (in about a week and a half — have been home sick), I figure it’s okay to post about both of them together. I first read about Daemon on Joi’s blog, and it sounded interesting enough to give a try.  

[Semi-spoilers below. If you like cyberspace thrillers, you probably want to read these -- and could probably go without the following paragraphs.]

Anyway, I liked them both a lot — probably Daemon a little more than Freedom (TM). They’re sort of a mix between Fight Club and World of Warcraft, with maybe some Blade Runner thrown in — lots of great ideas, lots of real implications of the technologies we all use constantly.

I will say that Daemon is the first novel I’ve ever read that included the syntax for a SQL injection attack on a web site — but maybe that’s just me.

There’s a lot of technical jargon for fiction, and lots of solid ideas about how technology works and what the future could hold — and clearly researched extremely well.

Anyway, they’re a fun couple of books — if you’re wondering what World of Warcraft grafted onto our own everyday world might look like, these are a great place to start. (That particular part gets a lot more pronounced in the second book.)

I think it’s a little too early to really understand the history, and certainly the implications, of the financial crisis that we’ve all been going through over the past 2 years. But I’m quite interested in the actual people who were (and are) involved, and understanding the decisions they made, and as much as I can about how those decisions felt to them.

Sorkin’s book is very useful in that regard — he clearly had outstanding access to most of the important players, and a good sense of the relationships between them. The book is a little bit too long, I think, and reads a little like a breathy soap opera in places, but seems to me that it will be the definitive contemporary accounting of the events of 2007 and 2008, if not the definitive history.

If you’re interested in this subject at all, I’d highly recommend the book — it caused me to have a number of “a ha!” moments and helped my understanding of the system. It’s also created a bit of contempt in me for the bankers and policy makers who were involved — but it’s only one accounting, so I’m inclined to learn a lot more.

Douglas Coupland is one of my most enduring favorite authors, along with Jonathan Lethem and Haruki Murakami and Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve found him to be the voice of my generation many times — even including when he popularized the term “Generation X” for my generation — in the title of his 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

Looking back now, from 2010, it’s clear that while we felt like life was accelerated in 1991, we had no idea how much faster culture and life would get — that we’d see the fundamental innovation of the web start to take hold just a few years later, and the rate of change would just get faster and faster and faster.

Coupland’s themes have always really spoken to me — he writes about the struggles we all go through to make meaning of our lives — in his book Life After God, he explores the idea that in the past, in America, that religion and the church was the main organizing principle — the connective tissue between events & moments that ultimately shapes all of it into something coherent. But that religion, for many Gen Xers, has lost that narrative power — and so we’re all searching around for something else to take its place.

The answer, naturally, has to be that nothing can take it’s place, and finding meaning in your life was never really connected purely to religion anyway — but the structure of activity and thought that religion brought made it a little easier. Finding meaning — rather, making meaning — is more intrinsic than that; it has to come from within yourself.

But I’ve been having a hard time with Coupland’s last few books — they’ve been harder for me to believe & internalize — they’re just a little more random and less accessible than I found his writing before. Or it may be that as he — and I, and all of Generation X — gets older that the ideas of alienation and narrative and meaning are getting harder to think about, harder to see — so you have to just tell stories to try to get a glimpse at their truths.

I liked this book; it’s a little quirkier than I was hoping for, and I can’t tell yet what meaning to make from it — but think I may come back to it in a year or two to consider it again. (And it’s already caused me to pick up Life After God again.)