Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

He didn’t see that coming…

Another first – this time reading a real book in less than 24 hours. I’ve never been a particularly prolific reader, given the way the words don’t really make much sense and swim around on the page, and that by the time I’ve got to the end of a sentence I’ve forgotten where it started. It was Douglas Couplands “Hey Nostradamus!”, so disposable trash, but 240 odd pages of disposable trash in 24 hours, thats an average of 10 pages an hour. Remarkable. I feel all burned out now, time to get back to “Globalization and its discontents”, a somewhat dry look at the IMF from the point of view of an advisor to the World Bank.

HN! is trash, its typical Coupland, character narative, character building incident at begining, study of human interaction and coming to terms with incident throughout book, theres no depth, everyone is so fake, characatures. But its an easy read, and compelling enough to get me through the spaces between snacks on an 11 hour flight.


2 comments

  1. I really liked Coupland’s Microserfs, but never really felt anything else he did lived up to it. Not tried HN, but now don’t feel desperately inclined to.

    • Don’t get me wrong, I *love* Couplands writing, and particularly liked Microserfs, for me its the kind of writing that slightly opens the door on what it must be like to be able to read well. There aren’t many authors who do that for me, William Gibson has at times, but his work is far more intense and I can’t take it in at that kind of pace.

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