Of all things Geek. I am…
Is Raymond Gunt the worst person ever? At a minimum, he’s had some help…
This book’s main character, Raymond Gunt, may in fact be the worst person ever, or he may just be proof that assumptions and a lack of context make for the worst in people. Truth be told, that’s probably and sadly more common than we’d all like to think.
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Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century by Douglas Coupland is eye-opening. While the writing and delivery is very Coupland, the medium this time is unique.
This collection of essays isn’t random. It all belongs together and reflects where Coupland and we as a human species were when this was published in the fall of 2013.
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At some point in our lives, we read children’s books. Perhaps they were read to us, but the very nature of a “children’s book” conjures up clean white pages with simple stories and often beautiful illustrations.
Later on, we move away from children’s books. We put away anything remotely childish like a picture book, and we start reading for school. It’s the stuff without pictures and often without an interesting cover. If that didn’t kill your love of books and you’re among those of us still reading, you’re probably as far away from picture books as ever…
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What happens when one of the most inventive novelists of contemporary modern literature writes about the future in the context of new ideas and their future repercussions in a five-chapter book, each representing one hour? In this case, you get Player One: What Is to Become of Us (The CBC Massey Lectures), which was created for the 2010 lectures. “Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her…
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On at least three different occasions, I have picked up my parents’ hand-me down paperback of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and I have not gotten past page nine or ten yet. So I was happy to get a biography of the man and a cliffnotes of his career from of one of my favorite contemporary authors, Douglas Coupland.
Coupland was selected to write about Marshall McLuhan for the series Extraordinary Canadians. Now that I know more about McLuhan, at least more than I knew from friend Professor Sara Netzley and my parents, I now see the wisdom of series editor John Ralston Saul in pairing him with Coupland.
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