My computer recently tried to commit suicide

Friends, the ol' desktop died the death last week - it ended up in something called a reboot loop - and we were without internets, or other computery functions, for what seemed like an eternity. Hubby got it sort of fixed last night - we lost everything on the damned thing, and I mean everything, for he had to download Firefox to it this morning.

In the meantime, I've been reading. I don't have time to post real reviews of the books I enjoyed while I was stuck in 1989 because today I have to ferry Gregory-bunny back and forth to the vet, multiple times. Short reviews for those short on time - GO!

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

This book really deserves much more attention than I can currently give it. Dazai takes the classic Japanese novel of ennui and social alienation to a whole new level, focusing on a character whose primary symptom of such is raging alcoholism. Truly hardcore. Dazai continues to blow my mind.

The Rose Rent by Ellis Peters

Fantastic! Heavy on the plot of the murder and allowing the civil war to fall into the background, Peters' thirteenth Cadfael chronicle is amongst my favourites.

Hubby and I watched the first Cafael movie, One Corpse Too Many, recently. It was really enjoyable although the pacing seemed rushed and they changed some key details from the book, and not to the story's advantage, in my opinion. The casting was great, however, especially with those chosen to play Cadfael, Hugh Beringer, and Prior Robert.

Count Zero by William Gibson

The second installment in the Sprawl trilogy. I wasn't certain at first, for it seemed a bit scattered, but when I figured out where Gibson was going - brilliant. And, of course, a great read like Neuromancer. Don't deprive yourself by not reading Gibson!

All this in the time it takes to eat a delicious bowl of oatmeal. Put almond butter in your oatmeal, friends; trust me.

PS-The poll results: a tie between Woolf's The Waves and Pamuk's The White Castle. I've decided to read Pamuk because I like him better than Woolf. That is all.

William Gibson created the word "cyberspace"; I would like to add "future-sciencey" to the lexicon

William Gibson, like all the best Sci-Fi writers, was (is? I don't know; I've read only this one book, his first) a visionary. Neuromancer, written in 1983 and published in 1984, imagines a world that was crazy and future-sciencey then and is pretty damned familiar in lots of ways now, but still also compellingly future-sciencey.

Our strung out hero is Case, a cowboy of the new frontier in what Gibson coined "cyberspace". Yes, Gibson is the author that created that word that's nestled so comfortably into modern English parlance. Cyberspace is a vast, abstract plain in which information can be manipulated and contained, infected with a virus or used like one, and perhaps gain its own sense of itself. Gibson may be the first author to fully imagine this brave new world of the internet, its vulnerabilities and potential for attack, and artificial intelligence, and it continues to be born around and through us now.

Or, a little practical perspective on how creatively and prophetically forward-thinking Gibson was when he wrote Neuromancer. Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1983, when I was 8 years old; I didn't get my first email account until I was 18 - 10 years later. And I certainly didn't try to resist the unstoppable introduction of the interwebs into my life; I got an email account pretty much the second I heard about such things - which was, for me, first-year university. It was all text-based at my undergraduate institution - until 1999, when I completed my MA.

I draw this time line only to point out how quickly the technology is changing and improving. And to remind my husband that while the internet as it currently stands does kind of suck (as he recently proclaimed), it's because as a culture we're now comfortable imagining how awesome it can and should be, and we're impatient that it's not there yet. We're living that frontier life every day, where the computer nerds are hackers and the limits are only our brilliant and sick imaginations.

You'll indulge my enthusiasm here (something which I am often simply too cool for); but Neuromancer embodies everything I think Sci-Fi should be - gutsy, out there, and committed to a future that's infinitely more interesting than the present, if not nearly as safe. You may have noticed that I don't actually read very much Sci-Fi at all, however. The fact is, I'm afraid to - because of Neal Stephenson (awesome), and this crazy book I read as a kid and can't recall the name of (it involved someone tearing their information pack out of the skin on their back) but which still haunts me, and plenty of terrible Sci-Fi films.

All these things make me afraid of bad Sci-Fi and because I've read so little Sci-Fi at all, I have no idea what's good. Well, Gibson's really good. The story is kick ass but the guy can actually really write too, and that makes Neuromancer solid gold. I've also been told by one of my favourite nerds in the know to read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, and my husband is currently being bedazzled by China Mieville's The Scar. So, there are some books to look forward to, including the two sequels to Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Slight Tangent
But to continue the Gibson-Mitchell struggle for my deepest devotion, I've begun The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. There couldn't be two more different books...but that's the way I like it, this flipping between radically different worlds. Indeed, this is something I've always known about myself but it somehow just occurred to me today that it's an important part of why I think Cloud Atlas is one of the best novels ever written, and why it's my clear favourite (I never had a clear favourite before I read Cloud Atlas, just a fairly malleable top 5). Because it is simultaneously unified and shockingly diversified - unlike any other novel, it leaves me completely satisfied.

Goddamn, I love to read.

David Mitchell and William Gibson dance-fight to win my heart

Last night, I went to an event at Toronto's annual International Festival of Authors - David Mitchell and William Gibson in conversation with someone else who I hadn't heard of, and who persisted in mispronouncing the name of the titular hero of Mitchell's latest novel, even after being corrected. Let's pretend that he wasn't there. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, William Gibson read from his new novel, Zero History. I have yet to read any of Gibson's work, but what I heard was very engaging, so I'll make a point of checking him out. He does have a very unique voice, as Jason mentioned a long time ago now.  It kind of made everything sound like a slightly stoned and somewhat funny hard-boiled detective novel; very enjoyable to listen to.

As Jason is a big fan of Gibson's, I picked him up a copy of the new novel and got it signed. In between "Jason" and "William Gibson" I got the author to write that now famous blurb about the internet being a series of tubes...which increased the value of the book in my mind, but maybe not in either Gibson's or Jason's. Sigh.

Right before I met Gibson (so much for my attempt at strict linearity here!), I witnessed a fan-Gibson interaction that filled me with some hope about the yout' of today. Hope, mind, not unshakable confidence. Here's what happened: A girl-fan of approximately 16 years got Gibson to sign all her copies of all of his books. There was a limit on each person - only four books each - so she had a friend in tow to get the others signed on her behalf.

She got all her books signed. She got her friend to take a photo of her and Gibson. And then she fled, shrieking in a very teenage girl sort of way. Hope: she was a teenaged reader absolutely stricken, not by Stephanie Meyer and not by whoever wrote those damned Gossip Girl books, but by William Gibson, who was writing what I'm told is the bestest of Sci-Fi long before she was even a high-pitched gleam in either of her parents' eyes. Incomplete confidence: She did still shriek like a harpy wielding a mystical sword to cut your face off with.

Back to linearity. Right after Gibson read from his book, David Mitchell came out to read - not, as expected, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but from the new book he's currently writing! And it was really good, although he very humourously called himself out on some sentences he wasn't satisfied with.

Afterward, they sat down with unknown fellow mentioned above and proceeded to show just what a bloody damned smart and cagey choice it was to put them together. They're both brilliant and funny and compelling, but even more so together, I think. A lot of the best parts - like when Gibson said people were "now-centric" and Mitchell said, "Oh, that's good!" and as he was writing it down asked in a very precocious way, "Can I have that?" - have been likely already been tweeted (hashtag #IFOA).

But what likely won't make it to the Twitter - because it simply defies being put into words by everyone but me, for whom it happened - is how once the conversation ended, Mitchell and Gibson engaged in a complicated and highly ritualistic dance-fight, in which they attempted to win ascendancy in my heart. David Mitchell entered the competition with a huge handicap in his favour, for Cloud Atlas remains my favourite novel of all time (even if Hilary Mantel ought to be making him very nervous). Gibson, however, had the advantage of being a hippie draft dodger AND wearing cool sneakers AND owning a Twitter account called GAYDOLPHIN2.

First they circled one another, executing flawless pirouettes, Gibson in his kicks and Mitchell in his signature steel-toes. Neither appeared to gain an advantage at this point, so they quickly changed tactics and re-enacted the dance-knife fight scene from Michael Jackson's "Beat It" but both quickly learned that if the pen isn't as mighty as the switchblade, it does cause some fearful stains on favourite shirts, and so altered their respective strategies again.

While David Mitchell performed a modern, interpretive routine to Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" (a song which, for reasons I can't entirely explain, always makes me think of Black Swan Green), Gibson countered by performing the Robot to Run DMC's "It's Like That". At this point, it seemed as though Gibson would triumph for the Robot is the Michael Jordan slam dunk of dance-fight moves - it wins the game 99% of the time.

But Mitchell had the advantage of greater variety, and countered with a transcendent pas de deux in which he performed both parts simultaneously. In the end, Mitchell won the pitched battle for my heart, but Gibson will certainly not be banished...

Meanwhile, Hilary Mantel lurks in the background, waiting for her moment...

That's all true - except for what I just said.