Its half past eight and I’ve been up for three hours now. For some people that might be fine but I’m not a morning person, never have been and its increasingly looking like I never will be. For some reason my mind and body are sluggish and unresponsive in the day time but by evening I’m firing on all cylinders and that’s when I tend to do my best thinking and work. Which is a bit unfortunate when you consider the daytime is when I actually am at work. That’s not to say I don’t like the mornings – the world is quite a nice place before and while everyone is getting up and before the mad rush to work starts happening.
Some books are just full of electricity. I’m reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson at the moment. Set in the modern day it captures the sensation of being on the edge of things – not quite getting the whole picture – perfectly. What makes it brilliant is not the plot but more the minutiae of the main character Cayce and her connection to the world around her. Gibson’s writing has matured considerably since his (still excellent) early books and this is an extremely well crafted book. A real pleasure to read. It also illustrates well Gibson’s maxim that the future is already here, just not well distributed. The interactions on the internet echo the stories set in cyberspace of his earlier books. Like a magic trick done by Penn and Teller seeing how its done increases the magic somehow rather than decreasing it. This is Gibson’s best book by far.
Posted by Mark at July 29, 2003 09:53 AM