Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Another brilliant book by Gibson, and the first in the Blue Ant/Hubertus Bigend trilogy. The likable but neurotic protgagonist, Cayce (pronounced "Case"), is a coolhunter - a precog who uses her sensitivity to brands and logos to serve as a consultant to major franchises, helping them make branding choices based on what she senses will become trendy or not. In her spare time, Cayce and her online otaku friends obsess over "the footage" - segments of breathtaking, unearthly films scattered across the net, discovered a fragment at a time. Cayce's life changes when an exceptionally powerful employer hires her for a special consulting job, and draws her into a web of intrigue, Soviet mafia, and mystery...

I also really identified with Cayce, and many of her reflections resonated with me, such as, "Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless?"

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson

Just finished reading Stephenson's 1000-something page novel, REAMDE, which was amazing. (Excellent overview by Colin here: http://blogenburyisreading.blogspot.com/2011/12/neal-stephenson-reamde.html?m=1).

Stephenson has the impressive ability to weave together a host of characters and circumstances which, in the hands of a lesser author, would feel they had been chosen by a random word generator: jihadists, MMORPG, computer virus, British spy, Russian mafia, ski resort, Wikipedia. Well, maybe they do have a theme: it sounds like a James Bond movie, but without the glamour, and set against the new realities of postmodernity: the digital age and the international War on Terror.

Stephenson is truly a great author: each section of the book is told from the perspective of one of a handful of key characters, and each has a distinctive and authentic tone. Although the book plays like an action movie and largely examines the meaning of life as experienced in the scopes of a rifle, the detailed attention to psychology and the richness of the world feel (almost) Tolstoyan. (Making the Acknowledgments page quite interesting, since he lists areas of expertise, such as guns, which are seamlessly integrated into the plot, yet evidently draw heavily upon the knowledge of others.)

Although set in the present (near future?) and so less earthshatteringly visionary than The Diamond Age, I preferred this to Snow Crash and definitely recommend.

Stephenson's Novels

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• Interface (1994) 
• The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
• The Cobweb (1996) 
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• The Baroque Cycle
• Quicksilver (2003), volume I
• The Confusion (2004), volume II
• The System of the World (2004), volume III
• Anathem (2008)
• The Mongoliad (2010–2012)
• Reamde + Colin's review (2011)

Our Kind of Traitor

Just finished “Our Kind of Traitor” by John le Carre – I thought it was brand new, as I picked it up off the New Books shelf of our Library, but it was actually published in 2010. Well, it was excellent, as usual, but as I have seen in Le Carre’s other recent books, he increasingly indicts major distortions of society caused by massively outsized greed, corruption and international criminality.

In this book, a British academic and his lawyer girlfriend are drawn into helping Dima, a Russian vor or mafia-type, who wishes to defect to Britain to save himself and achieve revenge on a criminal kingpin who has killed Dima’s right-hand man. Dima is “the greatest money launderer in the world” and crusaders within the British Secret Service attempt to use his defection to clean up the financially corrupted British establishment, but they are naturally opposed by those who benefit from the corruption. The novel, intensely readable and absorbing, ends powerfully and unhappily.

le Carre asserts in comments on The Constant Gardener and Our Kind of Traitor that he does not exaggerate the extent of corruption, but if anything, understates it. Interested? Here’s a lengthy and very thoughtful interview, from Democracynow.com in which he discusses these views (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/11/exclusive_british_novelist_john_le_carr)

A quick, thought-provoking read - highly recommended.