Theres something easy about reading Coupland. His work is quite disposable at some level but at another it describes people who are enough like me that I can feel myself being drawn into their world.
This book takes us into the world of a games development company, with a small group of six developers stuck in a corner of the building working on their own project. It follows their lives over the course of the project, through its invasion by turtles to a hilarious climax involving an oriental fir tree.
It is a little self-referential, in that Coupland turns up in the book, but its nicely done, and in such a way that its a bit difficult to work out which bits are fiction, which are ‘fiction in the fictional world’ and which are real (I suspect none).
There are some nice touches, like the guy who is drive mad by the sound of the coffee machine idling (it emits a sound every 45 seconds that noone else can hear), and fantasies about Ronald McDonald. All of which is both plausible and utterly absurd.
Who should read this book: anyone geeky or who wants to understand us geeky people.