Do you wanna do a book club?
C’mon, let’s go and read.
Together. Fun stuff. Books that are (as suggested by the name of the club) vaguely advertising-adjacent, but not educational or insightful to Improve Ourselves — fictional, to Entertain Ourselves. Underrated, says I, in our industry.
The book of choice for our inaugural Club: Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson.
Why this one?
Why Pattern Recognition?
I like it.
I am, of course, someone who’s been making ads literally since I was in elementary school, so it’s natural (I think, anyone) that Pattern Recognition was my gateway drug to William Gibson. It centers around a woman who’s basically allergic to branding, sent on a mission by the owner of a marketing firm. It’s all right there.
The book is far more than just the advertising angle, of course, and I also enjoy the fact that Gibson himself basically takes speculative fiction into the realm of technology prophecy. Some of the books he’s written that were mad futuristic at the time now read as basically contemporary, until one of the few things pops up that he didn’t actually predict correctly, and you’re briefly confused until you remember the book was written in, like, 1996. (Not this one. This one was 2003.)
Give me a nutshell. No spoilers.
Like I said, the main character, Cayce Pollard, is more or less allergic to branding, making life difficult but also making her an effective marketing consultant. She gets called in to judge a proposed logo for a shoe brand, and although that engagement is only patchily successful, the founder of of the marketing firm that hired her, Hubertus Bigend, engages her for a different mission: tracking down the source of a mysterious series of film clips that have entranced sections of the internet. And it only gets more interesting and exciting from there.
This book has everything: mystery, intrigue, global travel, a missing dad, Russian mob violence, Cold War resonance, and (of course) then-futuristic technology.
Okay, I’m game. How are we doing this?
Casually. Reading along together, and talking about it — here, and/or on LinkedIn (however it ends up working out). No Google Meets, formal reading guides, or discussion questions, unless y’all decide you want those things — I am, above all, accommodating. Just talking about things and themes that jump out at us.
We’re starting with chapters 1-12. Don’t worry if it sounds like a lot — the chapters are short, and you’ll have a month to read them. So if you’re in, get to reading, and watch this space for our first discussion post September 24.
Questions? Comments? Requests? Drop ‘em in comments.