Hee. I posted earlier that I wondered what you all thought of Idoru and its take on fandom and media. Then I got all thinky and deleted it, thinking I'd reform the question later, with references to Pattern Recognition. Then I remembered that I had one more Pepperidge Farm Raspberry Milano cookie, and all else was forgotten. Nom nom nom.
Spike ,'Sleeper'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I've never fallen for Greg Bear, despite multiple attempts, but I've never attempted Queen of Angels. Maybe I should.
It's different, I think, from his other work. Very readable and engaging.
Some greg Bear I like - aome I don't . Haven't read Queen of Angels . Looking forward to it now.
Virtual Light is my favorite Gibson. I think Pattern Recognition is next. I'm the oddball that didn't get much out of Neromancer
Spook Country is still listed as "processing" at my library, but I've got it on reserve. I'll have to pick up Blood Music, too.
I loved Pattern Recognition; picked it up after Micole recommended it a while back. He's got the best handle of the online social dynamic of any writer I've seen (in a fictional setting, anyway).
Anybody ever read The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton?
I think I did. . . the title at least is familiar to me but it must have been a long, long time ago.
Does this jog your memory?
The novel is cast in a favorite traditional form for children's fantasy: Edward and Eleanor Hall, a pair of children in Concord, Mass. (circa 1962), discover a secret attic room in Uncle Freddy's big old house on Walden Street. The room contains a cryptical poem tantamount to a treasure map, and a variety of antique toys that draw them into an eerie and fantastic otherworld that continually impinges on this one through visions, through dreams, and through encounters bizarre and grotesque. There is a haunted harp, a spectral nautilus shell, an evil jack-in-the box, a magic mirror, a missing Prince Krishna of Mandracore . . . and permeating everything, references and reverberations of the Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Over-Soul. I managed to forget most of the literary references in the 30 or so years since I first read this book, but I have never forgotten the nautilus.
I remember The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron as another favorite.
I didn't read The Diamond in the Window, but I read The Swing in the Summerhouse (the sequel).
I loved L. M. Boston's Green Knowe books, in a similar vein.