More books

Picked up a couple of new (used) books over the weekend, a hardbound copy of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Douglas Coupland's debut novel Generation X, which looked like one of those software manuals from the '80s. Got both books for only Php650 off Avalon.ph, ayos na ayos na!

I decided to skip Genius for the meantime, although I did peek at the first parts of the book, where Eggers (hilariously) discusses his book and its merits:

4. Actually, many of you might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 209-301, which concerns the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.

5. Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you to page 109 or so, which is a nice novella sort of length. Those first four chapters stick to one general subject, something manageable, which is more than what can be said for the book thereafter.

Meanwhile, I ended up finishing Generation X overnight. It's a profoundly sad novel, and, rather than summarizing the sentiments of a generation, it taps deep into the psyche of a group of twentysomethings who are "underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable."

I can relate to most of what the characters are going through, especially the futility and the "futurelessness" that seems to define this era in our lives. I can relate for their need to just get out of the road to perdition, or worse, yuppie-hood. I could see a lot of my thoughts being reflected on the pages, sometimes eerily so. The novel would depress me, too, except that I was kind of in a happy place while I was reading it, so everything just went over my head.

I read an article once comparing Douglas Coupland and Nick Hornby, and how they both captured the mood of a similar age. I could see the connection, but they go off in very different paths. While Coupland showcases a sort of contempt for the culture that envelopes the world of the twentysomething, Hornby embraces it (most prominently on High Fidelity), acknowledging instead of denying how we need and use popular culture (music, film, and books) to define ourselves and even fill some of the gaps in our lives. After all, human relationships are messy and difficult, while pop culture not only goes down easy, it also easily lends itself to categorization and definition.

Sometimes I wonder if that's what I'm doing with my life, and, as sad as that sounds, it's not all that bad.

- posted by jaemark @ 7/31/2005 07:56:00 PM