Agent Palmer

As someone who has, at this point, read almost every easily accessible published work of Douglas Coupland, this book is something of a crescendo.

“Bit Rot” is shorts and essays, from some things I have read and many that are new to me. But it is the crux of the book’s essence that’s amazing to experience.

Years ago, and much closer to its 2014 publishing date, I told you about Console Wars and its masterful retelling of the marketing and gaming dominance match between Nintendo and Sega.

The book is absolutely amazing, but the documentary also stands on its own. Since it clocks in at only 90 minutes, it’s best referred to as the abridged story of the Console Wars as they occurred.

Given my interest in politics and a college minor in journalism, it’s amazing it took me this long to read All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But it’s 50 years after its publication, and it is still a fast-paced, well-written masterpiece. 

It is a balm in troubling times that despite some of the horrors of the world, great investigative journalism was alive and well, and it could be again.

As I mentioned in my post about the Blind Date with a Bookstore, I selected to receive two books in my curated box and this is a review of those two books.

While I enjoyed both books, I did not think I could come up with enough to say about both individually to write separate reviews and honestly, since they arrived together and I read them back to back, it made sense to write about them together.