Now that _Zero History_ is out, I decided to go back and re-read the prior two Bigend Books.
I first read _Pattern Recognition_, on a trip to Miami in 2003 just after it came out. At the time, I thought it might be my favorite of William Gibson’s books. Now…well, I still enjoyed it, but it felt a little light on substance. Perhaps it’s that it was trying to posit something changing just a little too close to the present, and as a consquence, it seems more glaring when it misses the mark. The whole idea of the Sekrit Footage, when considered in light of YouTube just doesn’t quite have the resonance it did 8 years ago.
There is something to the dreamy, paranoid quality that the book has that I still find attractive, though this time through I also found some of the text very jarring. A lot of phrases that seemed to me too cutesy or too clever.
Anyway, it’s not like I intend to get rid of it, but I don’t know that I’ll re-read it in fewer than another 8 years.
