Whenever I read anything by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, I feel somehow like the book was written for me to read at that precise moment in my life. Actually, that's been happening a lot lately, with many books I've been reading, like the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and slightly more recently both The Forever War and Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. I suppose there's a pretty prosaic explanation for this.
I'm not sure exactly what the connection is, this time to Pattern Recognition, but I think that part of it is the illustration (which happens to be very useful at the moment) of a woman who is very, very interesting, but entirely unlike the woman who briefly, but quite utterly, replaced Stella in my heart.
