The fact that I stopped reading All Families Are Psychotic and started reading this is just further proof that I think an enormous lot of thoughts in my brain, and many of them are rather irrational. In this case, my thinking was that if I was going to be disappointed in Douglas Coupland I’d rather be disappointed sooner than later. So instead of reading All Families are Psychotic, which Nymeth said was pretty good, I read Miss Wyoming, which I’d heard wasn’t very good at all. And then I shall read JPod because it looks strange, and then I shall read All Families are Psychotic, and we’ll see how it goes.
Miss Wyoming is all about two people – John and Susan – who have both, at different points in their lives, disappeared from their lives for a while. This is why I liked it, I think. I’m in love with the idea that it can be possible to extract yourself from where you are living and just, pfft, slip out of your life. But anyway, John and Susan meet once, and they like each other tremendously, and then Susan vanishes agan and John tracks her down. Interspersed with this is a lot of backstory about both of them, in varying degrees of interestingness.
I liked it. I loved this thing that one of the characters did about tracking someone down based on the typos they make. The idea being that people’s typing mistakes tend to remain the same – I myself am constantly typing “foundaiton” for “foundation” – and you can use that to find what computer somebody is using. What an excellent idea! So I still like Douglas Coupland. I am feeling better about my reading diversity now that I have recently discovered two authors who are men that I really, really like; as well as reading Markus Zusak’s other books. I am not a sexist reader. Yay.