]]>What's the best book you read this year?
Definitely Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, the famous grandpappy of cyberpunk. Though it was - for me, and most other Gibson fans - those early "Sprawl" books like Neuromancer and Count Zero that warmed me to his work, and the later interweaved series, which wove together Idoru, Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties into an intensely satisfying brew of near-future speculative fiction, that kept that warm spot hot, I'd have to say Pattern Recognition is now my favourite by Gibson.
It's not cyberpunk at all, really. It takes place in a believable present-time. And the lead narrative character, a woman of indeterminate age named Cayce Pollard, has a very odd defect which is also the ability upon which she makes her living - or possibly, dying...
She has what I'd term a strange relationship with corporate logos. Would, that is, if it were not so similar to my own syndrome concerning them.