William Gibson, "All Tomorrow's Parties" -- picked it up for 50c at a used book sale. Really hope it starts coming together with all these disparate plot threads.
That's a really tough one to start with if you haven't read Virtual Light and Idoru.
I haven't. But I'll see it through to the end. There are only about five books I put down and never bothered to finish... and that's in something like 25 years of reading books that weren't "kids books".
The thing with All Tomorrow's Parties is that half of the characters are from Virtual Light and have ties to that book's plot, and the other half are from Idoro and have ties to that book's plot, and the language, ideas, and other milieu in the world that encompasses all three books and there are only a very small amount of new characters, i.e. the kid who likes wristwatches and he has his own storyline that bridges the plots and disparate storylines from the previous books. Gibson's long works always have four or five (or more) storylines at the beginning, and as the characters reach one another and the storylines combine he sets up the last chapter or two where all of the characters are involved at the same time in doing the same thing with a shared POV.
I dunno what the "kid's books" crack was about, but whatever. I don't want someone to dislike Gibson, a writer I've loved since the first time I read Neuromancer in 1988 or so, because they miss all the nuance by reading the last book in a trilogy first. But hey, what do I know, I'll temper my recommendations from now on.
