** William Gibson – Spook Country
** Jonathon Swift – Gulliver’s Travels

Thinking about Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, I kind of got them mixed up into one story that somehow involved Cayce Pollard and the footage and a mysterious shipping container but, oh yeah, I read Spook Country in October and that’s where the shipping container came from. The shipping container mystery sure was pretty interesting until we actually found out that it was zzzzzzzzzz. Whatsername, Hollis, was an okay character, but like Cayce she seemed sort of cool and shiny and not very connected with the reader at all. I don’t feel like I know them or anyone else in these books. And in terms of interesting moments and general reading pleasure, this one fell short of Pattern Recognition. I’ll still keep reading Gibson, but it’s been a while since the arrival of a new Gibson book was an “omg must have” moment.

I will probably get attacked for this (or would if anyone read my blog), but I found Gulliver’s Travels, on my first rereading since high school, to be pretty boring and flat. I know that Swift is supposed to be a master of satire (and yes, the eating babies thing is still funny), but the satire and social insight stuff supposedly found in this book is lame in the extreme. Oh, people are self important however big or small they are! People disagree over silly things and will kill over them! Were these observations shocking even when Swift made them? Some of Swift’s imagining of how Gulliver would interact with people so large or so small (sorry, I got bored by the end of the Brobdingnag section and skipped the rest) was fun to read.