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I have been avoiding reading fiction lately (or for awhile now). Why? Because I have a finite amount of spare time, and much too much I’d like to do. If I were to spend a week reading a new book, I’d loose out on a week’s worth of spare time to work on my projects. Quite unfortunate. Maybe I could do my recreational reading at work. I’m sure my boss would like that.

Luckily (right..) my harddrive crashed and I had some downtime to do some non-computer stuff. One of those things I did was read Pattern Recognition. I’m not sure if I am a fan of Gibson necessarily, but he’s required reading for nerds. I did enjoy his cyberpunk works, but kinda held off on Pattern Recognition because it was set in the present.

The book is written in his typical flowing stream of thought type writing. Incompelete sentences, words bombarding you. I imagine mind reading to be similar. Sure, it gets the same point across but I think I prefer more complete sentences.

The story itself? Slow to start. In the first couple of chapters I was wondering what the point was. The main premise of the story is the search for the creator(s) of some mysterious footage. Definitely not some sort of band of merry friend’s who grow closer together while traveling to the far reaches of the globe to save the world. Fine, I’ll pretend the “footage” is the Holy Grail.

Eventually, the main character finds the creator. Well, not eventually. I don’t have the book with me, but the ratio of heroic-journey pages versus pre-journey-character-buildup-in-the-trendy-drop-readers-in-their-confusing-lives-and-then-explain-it-chapters-later-fashion pages doesn’t seem so good. That and the ending was unfulfilling for me, but maybe I shouldn’t have pretended the “footage” was the Holy Grail.

And the 9/11 references. Gibson said he rewrote the story when it happened because the world had changed and so had the character’s. Well maybe “rewrote” as in “tacked on”. I personally thought the 9/11 references were unnecessary to the story could could have been omitted.

And what was up with the Chinese programmer guy? Did Gibson initially have plans for him? Or was he just a red herring for the reader’s sake. Lame regardless. Gibson presented him as a character important to the story, but ultimately he character accomplished nothing.

I wouldn’t say the book was a waste of time. It was entertaining, but not one those “if I were trapped on an island with one book” type of books or “trapped on an island with 1000 books” type of book. Of course your mileage may vary.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 17th, 2004 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.