Doug is doing a reading from the book on Sunday, November 30th at 12:30pm at the Metropolitan United Church at Queen and Church.

In addition to being my neighbour, Doug — through some weird cosmic coincidence — taught history at my high school, although a few years before I was a student there.

The basic premise of the book is that the prophet Mohammed made a last revelation that could radically change the nature of Islam, then was killed shortly afterwards to hush it up. Thomas Jefferson, while still the US Minister to France, started to uncover some of this secret, then some present-day researchers get close to the secret and start getting bumped off. It’s an interesting story, and one reviewer called it the “Da Vinci Code of Islam” for the way that it purports to reveal secrets about a powerful religion that would greatly impact that religion and its followers.

However, I think that the author may be taking himself a bit too seriously: in an interview with the author just before the book was released, he claimed to be receiving death threats, and stated:

There has been a plot afoot that was set in motion by the Muslim Brotherhood in this country [the US] to undermine the United States and to basically destroy the Constitution and replace our democracy — as crazy and far-fetched as it sounds — with Sharia law.

Crazy and far-fetched? Yup. Worth reading? It’s okay, but you might want to wait for the movie.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US. You can find the author’s website here.

Update: I have no interest in discussing religion or US politics on this site; this was just a book review. I’ve closed comments on this post to avoid having others use this as a place to promote their religious or political views. Feel free to express those views, just not on my site.

There were a lot of things that I liked about this book. First of all the Toronto setting was used well, and there were great insider references, such as when Mara’s friend tried to pass off her new Mississauga location as “Port Credit” (an accurate place name, but to anyone who lives in the 416 area code, it’s all just undifferentiated suburban wilderness). I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a new boyfriend does not figure in her miraculous turnaround — in fact, Mara does it pretty much on her own, with a bit of help from her friends. There’s a nutritional epiphany about a healthy-sounding smoothie. There’s some great inner monologues of Mara’s thoughts during yoga class.

There were parts of the storyline that could have been improved. First, Mara spends 25 years getting herself into a complete disaster of a life, including the worst two months of it chronicled in the first part of the book, then manages to turn the entire thing around in 3 weeks. A bit unrealistic, considering that she comes off as a bit of a naive pushover. The two girlfriends were painted as cruel caricatures; if they were really such bitches, I can’t believe that Mara, pushover that she is, would have been best buds with them all this time. She refers to her size 10 body as if it were bordering on obese, which is not a great message to be sending to her target audience, even if they are pigging out on those calorie-laden smoothie.

In spite of its flaws, I found Stuck in Downward Dog to be a fun read with lots of laughs, and may even be inspirational to young women who are looking for the courage to find the right job, the right apartment and the right relationship with their friends.

This week, I saw a link to MiniBookExpo for Bloggers, which promises to be another source of interesting books. They list books that are available for review from the publishers, you add a comment to the post about the book in order to claim it, they send you the book, and you review it. Shipping is free, and there’s nothing about having to return the books, so I can pass them along to the book collection in my condo, or even donate them to the public library if I can figure out how to do that. Looking forward to receiving my first book for review!

The first one that I attacked was Douglas Coupland‘s jPod, and I have to admit that I was disappointed; although this is called “Microserfs for the age of Google”, I found it inferior to Microserfs. I actually liked most of the story and the characters: a group of Vancouver-based game software developers who were building an entire evil subplot into what was supposed to be a children’s video game, and some of their strange companions. However, there were some really stupid page-wasters, such as when one of the characters created a challenge related to the first 10,000 digits of pi, it was accompanied by the entire 10,000 digits. Yawn, interrupted only by the fast flipping of pages past this nonsense. The largest of these went on for several pages, and became more than a little annoying. The most annoying thing, however, was the way that Coupland wrote himself into the book as some sort of evil genius. Not funny, not even interesting.

There’s very few books that I haven’t finished, once I pick them up, and I did finish this, although I don’t recommend it. Also, I wanted to include it the arts challenge (although I figure it’s cheating a bit, since that I can pop off 50 books pretty quickly and wouldn’t consider that to be fulfilling the arts challenge obligation).

He became the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved.

ROTFL.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really need some sort of social networking mashup around the Toronto Public Library site, where I could show the list of books on my hold list, and see those of my friends in order to get ideas of what to line up next. I have to check out more of the LibraryThing functionality, but this might serve a similar purpose.