Reading this right now. ARGH. I'm not keen for some reason I can't discern. Maybe I'll work it out when I've finished it.

Amazon.co.uk Review:

Heroine of this outstanding tale is Miss Wyoming, Susan Colgate, teen beauty-queen and low-rent soap actress. Dragooned into stardom by her demonically pushy, hillbilly mother, Susan's career is at rock-bottom. When she finds herself sole survivor of an air-crash, she views it as her opportunity to vanish, embarking on a voyage of personal discovery.

Meanwhile, John Johnson, debauched star of such Hollywood legends as Bel Air PI?, also longs to vanish. After a near-death experience, where he is treated to a vision of Susan's face, he roams the badlands of the western States. Back in L.A., a chance meeting sets him on a mission to unravel the mystery of Susan Colgate.

Coupland has a genius for capturing the absurdities of modern existence and using them as backdrop for a tale of hope and fulfilment. The curses of the cyber-age--junk-mail and web-junkies, fast food, jaded TV weather forecasters--teem around the central st0ry, creating a vivid and darkly funny tale. His peripheral characters are just as richly drawn. A scriptwriter and his supernaturally intelligent girlfriend, a recluse who spends his evening generating Internet rumours--all manage to be blessed and cursed, numbed by their pointless existences but full of humanity when put to the test. Picture Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut co-writing Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and you come halfway to grasping Coupland's uniquely funny and thoughtful brand of storytelling. --Matthew Baylis

Finished this morning. There was just something about this novel that I didn't like. That something was it's lack of sympathy for the characters. There was just no compassion in it; these people were treated like experiments by the author and that annoyed me. I would still like to read Microserfs at some point, but if he treats those characters with the same lack of humanity as he did Susan, John and everyone in Miss Wyoming, I swear that I will burn it.

Maybe his characters are full of humanity, but I'm pretty sure Douglas Coupland isn't!

RELEASE NOTES:

Releasing in transit to the Colchester Meet tomorrow!

I found this book in the phone box next to Sudbury Train Station. It was a very welcome suprise, as I was about to embark on a long (and as it turned out, hugely delayed) journey to York, and I had no change to buy even a newspaper. I got through about a third of it on the train, although that was a few weeks ago and I've been too busy to read since. So I will finish it soon and then review it properly.
And then I suppose I might release it somewhere in York. Near the train station feels appropriate, hopefully it will help some other poor traveller in need of a distraction.