I couldn't figure out what this was in the first half, which is another way of saying I enjoyed the second half

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This book was an interesting collection of essays and stories that keep the reader learning, mulling, laughing and perhaps shed a tear.

Douglas writes very fluidly and provides stories that are sure to make you learn a thing or 2.

Rating: 4/5

Favourite quote: "Science tells us that all humans grow ten thousand new brain cells a day, but if we don’t activate them by learning new things, they’re reabsorbed back into our bodies—which is slightly creepy, but if you don’t try to retain them, then you probably don’t deserve them."

Douglas Coupland was one of the authors I enjoyed a lot when I was a teenager, but coming back to him as an adult hasn't been the best experience. Jpod and Microserfs seemed so fresh and hip to me, but nowadays Coupland seems out of touch.

Bit Rot is a collection of essays and short stories intermixed together, and both fell flat for me. The essays were just dated and it feels like Coupland doesn't quite get culture anymore. I enjoyed some of the short stories but others felt incredibly cheesy (the one about the time travelers who do makeovers on historical figures was especially painful). This was a slog for me to read, and I didn't end of caring for it. Your mileage may vary, as others seemed to have enjoyed it.

Bit Rot: stories + essays by Douglas Coupland is a very highly recommended thought provoking eclectic collection of over 65 essays and stories. "'Bit Rot' is a term used in digital archiving that describes the way digital files of any sort spontaneously (and quickly) decompose. It also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones."

I enjoyed the intermingling of the essays and the stories in this very diverse and satisfying collection. The pieces range from insightful to personal to witty to hilarious, and include a level of perception and depth along with technological and cultural observations. I will admit that I liked the essays more than the short stories, but a few of the fictional pieces stood out. Almost all of the essays were winners (with the exception being the Google searches, although it was interesting).

Anyone familiar with Copeland's writing knows that he has an exceptional way with words and a unique way of observing the world. It is all evident here. Normally I try to avoid including quotes from review copies, but these pieces are finished and previously published. The quotes will give you a taste of what Copeland has served up in this collection:

A common question I ask people whenever film discussions come up is, "What is the movie that scared the shit out of you when you were eleven or twelve - the film that you were probably too young to watch, but you watched it anyway, and it totally screwed you up for the rest of your life?" Everyone’s got one. Mine was Lord of the Flies, but other common answers are The Exorcist and Event Horizon. The point is that we all know that magic window in time when one is most susceptible to fear."
(This is a great question to ask people. I know my older brother took me to a movie...)

Last summer in Reykjavik, I learned that one in ten Icelanders will write a novel in their lifetime. This is impressive, but the downside of this is that each novel gets only nine readers. In a weird way, our world is turning into a world of Icelandic novelists, except substitute blog, vlog or website for novel - and there we are: in Reykjavik. (As a long-time blogger, I actually laughed aloud over this.)

It turns out that smell is a vector, and for every smell there exists an anti- smell, and the anti- smell of human death is artificial cinnamon. You learn something new every day, and this is what you learned today.

The slowness and cluelessness of some Starbucks staff drive me insane. I want a brewed coffee, here’s two dollars, so come on, just pour the damn thing. Starbucks needs an express lane. Do they ever count how many customers leave because they don’t want to wait for ten minutes behind useless people ordering complicated, useless beverages? I think they must.

I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work- shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. (This translates to employees that are students too.)

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries.... Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. (oh yeah.)

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the Penguin Publishing Group.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/03/bit-rot.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1933841378

Here Douglas Coupland goes again, trying to break our brains and our library cataloguing systems. Is Bit Rot fiction or non-fiction? It’s a collection of both! Oh noes! It contains short stories, including some previously published in Generation A (which I read almost 7 years ago, so I have zero recollection of any of it), and essays and assorted musings. In general, this is Coupland’s most up-to-date published writing on how we’re dealing with the rapid pace of technological progress.

I’m not going to talk about many of the specific entries in this collection, because there are so many. And, to be honest, they tend to blur together. As anyone who is familiar with Coupland’s work knows, his writing has a smooth quality to it: a little bit of prognostication, a little bit of paranoia, a little sideways weirdness. His voice and his ideas are always compelling. I think where he and I part ways, and where I often find myself disappointed, especially in his fiction, is our viewpoints on what constitutes a story or a novel. Coupland has a much looser, much more experimental attitude towards narrative—and that’s fine and valid if that’s what he likes. But it means that when his stories depart from the more conventional modes of storytelling that I enjoy, my brain has to work harder. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

Before I talk about a few of the high points, I’ll take issue with one particular contention. This is quoted on the back of the Random House hardcover I read and comes from the essay “3 1/2 Fingers” (read it here). Coupland describes his feelings and sensations around having to rewire a handwritten-trained brain to first type on keyboards and then use touchscreen, smartphone keyboards:

> But I can see that our species’ entire relationship with words, and their mode of construction, is clearly undergoing a massive rewiring. I bridge an era straddling handwriting and heavy smartphone usage. Young people like my friend’s daughter with her emoticons and rampant acronyms are blessed in having no cursive script to unlearn – with the bonus of having no sense of something having been lost. That’s a kind of freedom, and I’m jealous. Part of accepting the future is acknowledging that some things must be forgotten, and it’s always an insult because it’s always the things you love. We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return. That’s a very bad deal.

Although I understand the sensation he’s identify, I have to disagree with the assertion that exchanging handwriting for Comic Sans is in any way a “bad deal”. Yes, I know it is cool to hate on Comic Sans, and I used to be one of those people. But I’ve learned that a lot of people anecdotally like Comic Sans for its readability. And more broadly, what we have gained is not just Comic Sans per se but the ability, with the touch of a button, to alter the display of any piece of writing on our screen—to change its typeface, its size, its line-, letter-, and word-spacing, etc. That’s a superpower! And to do that, all we had to exchange was handwriting? My handwriting sucks! I’m down with that.

Fortunately, there is plenty in this book that doesn’t cause typographical arguments with the reader. One of my favourite stories is the longer entry “Temp”, quite understandably about a temp, Shannon, and her involvement with a company under negotiations to be bought by Chinese investors. I just love Coupland’s portrayal of Shannon, as well as the other characters. It reminded me a lot of his novels like JPod, and it has some great lines in it, such as, “It was a Quentin Tarantino standoff, where everyone holds a gun on everyone else, except there weren’t guns, just words and emotions.” Plus, it has a genuinely upbeat ending. Many of the essays and stories in this collection, while interesting, are not things I’d like to reread. “Temp”, on the other hand, is something I could see myself revisiting.

I also very much enjoyed Coupland’s musings on the economic angle of technology. Some of his writing about paper money and “flushing out” old money is a little absurd. But “World War $”, which you can read in its original form on the Financial Times website, is a succinct summary of how digital capitalism has broken money:

> How is money damaged? It is damaged because me having photons faster than yours by a few millionths of a second is enough to make me appallingly rich – again, for doing absolutely nothing except hacking into money itself. It’s hard to have respect for this kind of system. Often the latency issue is presented to the public as a “Wow, isn’t this cool!” moment when, in fact, it’s sickening, and is partially why the world began to feel one-percent-ish five years ago. Reasonably smart people inhabiting the Age of Latency are milking those still stuck in the pre-latent era.

Coupland is talking with reference to the 2008 financial crisis, and he is absolutely right here. Traders have hacked money to make more … well, money … and now this house of cards is crashing down. We shored it up 8 years ago, but that doesn’t mean we made the structure any less fragile.

In at least two instances, Coupland also belies our desire to perceive technology as alien or Other. He reminds us that technology, being by definition a creation of humans, is itself an expression of our humanity—all of it, the good and the bad qualities. So technology is not alien but instead one of the most human things in existence. I really like this perspective and this reminder, since it is very tempting to view technology as a black box or a dehumanizing force.

This is perhaps why I continue to return to Coupland as a writer despite occasionally finding his novels bizarre or less than enjoyable. Unlike some technology writers, Coupland does not evangelize, nor does his condemn. Coupland is not sounding the warning bells, but he hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid either. He is just a tourist in the 21st century—like a man woken from cryogenic sleep being introduced to new ideas far ahead of his time. Coupland possesses a refreshing mixture of cynicism and optimism that makes his analysis feel very genuine and thought-provoking.

I received access to a copy of this from NetGalley, because apparently Blue Rider Press is publishing this on March 7. However, it has been out in hardcover already (in Canada, at least) for a while, and I received a physical copy for Christmas (thanks, Dad!). So I actually read the physical copy. But I appreciate the ARC, if that’s what you would call it, as well!

(Review will be published on Goodreads on March 3, 2017.)

A mixed bag of a story that fell flat for me much too early on. I tried to get through it, but in the end skim-read it just to finish the book. Not my cup of tea.

I love Douglas Coupland's work. Well, I love some of his work. On the fiction side: Microserfs (best), Jpod, Life After God .. I guess that's it (the rest of it is generally a little too angsty and melancholic). But where Coupland really shines for me is his non-fiction, his essays and musings and revelations and bon mot about technology and our lives - or, in some ways, just our lives. I thought <i>Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays and Stories for an Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century</i> was fantastic.

This is why I was so delighted when I received an advance review copy from Netgalley and PENGUIN GROUP Blue Rider Press & Plume (thank you!) of <i>bit rot</i>. <i>bit rot</i> contains a collection of both fiction and non-fiction from Coupland. He talks about his art, his childhood, technology (of course), money, fear .. all the good stuff. His non-fiction continues to be my favourite aspect of his work, and I can't wait to go back and reread these pieces. Coupland is not only a deep-thinker but a startlingly clear writer. This is one of my favourite things about his work - his concepts and ideas are rich and complex, but to access them, via language, you don't have to have a PhD in semiotics. I like that is writings are so accessible (even if the underlying concepts require an extra think or two - as it should be!).

I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed most of his fiction as well. There were a couple of pieces that were more interesting in the concept rather than the execution ("George Washington's Extreme Makeover" in particular) - but for the most part, I enjoyed them - and they made me think in the same way his non-fiction does. And also occasionally made me a little sad and melancholy (typical Coupland :) ).

<i>bit rot</i> is excellent. I know it's been said many times but Coupland is the McLuhan of our age - <i>bit rot</i> ensures his place on that pedestal. If you're a Coupland fan, you'll enjoy this - and if you've only ever read his fiction or his non-fiction - <i>bit rot</i> is the perfect collection to introduce you to his other side.

You can't beat Coupland's view on life and a smattering of essays will titillate and entertain and then as an added bonus you get a handful of short fiction and stories that Coupland tosses in as well. For what it is: the best kind of stuff done by the best in the business at doing that very thing. Highly recommended!!!

I was so excited to see another Douglas Coupland book being published as he is one of my all-time favorite authors. I was also a little hesitant after reading the Worst.Person.Ever. (a book that was very disappointing to me). However, with Bit Rot I found myself addicted to the short stories and unable to put the book down. Some of the stories were very thought provoking and others quite humorous and I found myself laughing out loud. It was so refreshing to have a more “classic” Coupland book after reading the Worst.Person.Ever. Now I want to go reread some of his older books. Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.