{"id":6245,"date":"2015-05-22T20:04:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-23T00:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=6245"},"modified":"2016-10-07T10:59:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T14:59:08","slug":"the-gum-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/the-gum-thief\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gum Thief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;I think if human beings had genuine courage, they&#8217;d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn&#8217;t life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don&#8217;t they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Gum Thief<\/strong> by Douglas Coupland, published in 2007<\/p>\n<p>Roger is in his 40s &#8212; he&#8217;s bitter about life but has a dog who loves him. Bethany is in her 20s &#8212; she wears black lipstick and lives with her mom. They both work at Staples, and they start up a correspondence in a notebook. It&#8217;s about friendship, writing, and living your life. Coupland&#8217;s prose is glorious, and the novel is very funny. Coupland is a perceptive observer of human nature. I&#8217;m behind on my reading of\u00a0 his work, but I also immensely enjoyed <strong>Generation X<\/strong> and <strong>Shampoo Planet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>I previously reviewed Coupland&#8217;s novel <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/shampoo-planet\/\"><strong>Shampoo Planet<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;I think if human beings had genuine courage, they&#8217;d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn&#8217;t life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don&#8217;t they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,36,28,5],"class_list":["post-6245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-fiction","tag-novels","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6245"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9433,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions\/9433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}