I started rereading Pattern Recognition (my favourite of William Gibson's books) because I remembered and agreed with his theory about jet lag:

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

I love the prose, the immediacy of the present-tense narration that still manages to feel at one remove from any character's interior life, including Cayce Pollard. I love the depiction of the early oughts, the internet where forum posts and text are the primary interfaces, where permanent connectivity is available but unevenly distributed and never assumed, where "video" has to be uploaded to obscure corners of sites.

I was startled to find, in a reminiscence about London in the snow, a perfect depiction of my experience of Paris:

Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

But every time -- every time -- I read this book, I get caught off guard by the absolutely stupid joke that he spends literally a third of the book setting up. Voytek and Hobbs and Ngemi are, in their own ways and for their own reasons, collectors and connoisseurs of old computing equipment; when we meet them they are attempting to sell a trunkload of Curta calculators so that Voytek can buy a bunch of ZX/81 Spectra. The money has finally come through but there is a hiccup:

"Yes," says Ngemi, with quiet pride, "but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang."

GODDAMMIT GIBSON.