Occasionally, most often at airports and train-stations, I randomly browse through a book-store and buy something that sounds interesting. Seeing that I’m really bad when it comes to actually reading books - I spend way too much time reading stuff online and in magazines - I tend to have piles of unread books sitting next to my bed, on my desk and in my shelves.
The other day, while I was thinking about which books I wanted to read over the Christmas holidays, I stumbled across William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition which I bought at one point or another but never got around to reading. In fact I had totally forgotten that I even owned it. Anyway, between Christmas and New Year’s I finally managed to read it, in fact finishing the last 130-pages in one sitting during a train-ride to Berlin.
Admittedly it took me awhile to get into it but after the first 50-pages or so I really got into the swing of things. The story takes some time to unfold but once it does it the things going on in London, Tokyo and other places quickly become exciting. Especially the descriptions of various lives and streets in London are outstanding and worth a read in itself. As is the way experiencing jet-lag is illustrated as the soul being leagues behind when it comes to travelling and having to be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
It’s these thoughts and the portrays of cities, characters and especially moments in time that make the book such a good and entertaining read. Plus it’s got that quality where you simply don’t want to put it down and keep telling yourself to read one more chapter a couple of times before you realize it’s 5AM.
P.S. It was only while selecting some tags for this post that I found this old entry where I mentioned buying the book while I was in San Francisco. In this case it’s good that the Internet never forgets because obviously I do… ;-)
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