Allright, so life has been a little busy. And because I pretty much only update from work, I haven't been around at all. But it's okay, right? Yeah. It's okay.

I did finally finish Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." I went into it with a bad attitude after hearing tales of all the obnoxiousness he's surrounded the book with, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. Despite the self-absorption (and then awareness of the self-absorption, and then awareness of the awareness of the self-absorption), some of it was really genuinely touching and very funny. And I have a lot of begrudging respect especially for the introduction, up to and including the infamous "here is a picture of a stapler."

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it, it's not that important... basically this guy wrote a book about himself -- sort of a memoir even though he's quite young, I think in his mid-20s. His parents died when he was 21, and he wound up taking care of his 8-year-old brother. It made a big splash in the literary blah blah because he takes a lot of stylistic risks, right from the title: He has conversations with himself, is obsessively self-referential, ends his 20-something-page introduction with a drawing of a stapler. Etc.)

In the end, I probably wouldn't go for "Staggering Genius," but I'd give him "Heartbreaking." Except not for the reasons he wanted, I don't think... it sort of made me wish for a time when a book meant a story that someone made up, or at least an unself-consciously edited autobiography. The self-referentiality got depressing after a while, like he was endlessly examining and re-examining himself, living his life just to write about it, hyper-aware of his audience before they even existed. And he knows it, too, so you can't even criticize him for it.

But I think Douglas Coupland, even though it's cool to scoff at him these days, fights Eggers' battles much more successfully. Well, I won't speak for "Girlfriend in a Coma," but at least "Life After God" and "Microserfs." The two of them should go out for coffee (at some definitively un-Starbucksish location, of course).