book_reviews z i will endevour to review one book a week here. please do the same. 040708 ... zeke william gibson - pattern recognition "he took a duck in the face at fourty knots." set in contemporary times, this book exceeds my high expectations based on his other recent work. he has written an extremely modern description of a confluence between economic, historical, commercial, political, psychological and aesthetic forces enacting themselves in the life of one woman. he achieves this by exposition of details, both quotidian and expansive. he shows us just enough of the circumstance and internal experience of the character (cayce) to fully demonstrate her unusual personality. much of the action in the narrative takes place off screen or in the it's past. this puts the responsibility on the reader to continually construct a cross sectional index what it feels like to be her. i felt as the reader that, like a chess master who is faced with playing ten opponents at once, i was required to engage in a gestalt act of synthesis and construction starting from the extant conditions already in play. it is a very user friendly post structural exploded view of what feels like a real persona. the spare style of his prose is liberally sprinkled with lingo, both invented and actual. this serves to enhance the delivery of plot features, and to embed textural information in the context that explains the unusual circumstances of her life. the book is minimal without being empty and only just glances the edge of the existential. she, it turns out, is a consultant to advertising and marketing firms. she offers two essential services: coolhunting and very narrow assessment of corporate branding efficacy. in an interesting twist, her credentials are based on ambivalence bordering on revulsion to the mechanisms of the industry's she serves that is tantamount to a mild phobia. she is a sensitive. the crux of the novel's plot pretains to her obsessive interest in an anonymous artwork that is being slowly revealed via periodic and random internet posts. she is part of an online community that posts speculation, analysis and endlessly debates the minutia of the what little is known about the material as it is revealed. this interest is characterized as a fetish (though the material is not described as prurient). it becomes compelling when her phobias and her fetish clash in the inevitable conjoining of her private and public concerns. this book is amongst my current favorites. 040720 ... Otto Xref Fabio 080724 what's it to you? who go blather from