Ok, so in my earlier post about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I alluded to a "surprise book" I wanted to talk about it. And then in authentic HiddenJester style I got all busy and never followed up. Except I did! Follow up! Right Here! (and stole some stylings from Mimi Smartypants apparently. I've been doing to much archive reading when I should be doing my own writing)
So yeah, the book in question is So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield. Embarrassingly, I can't quite explain why I have this book. At some point I read a description of it on a blog and thought the book sounded very cool and dropped it onto my Amazon wishlist. I later decided I didn't like the source blog and dropped it from my reading list. Fast forward several months and I needed one more item to make an order be $25 and have free shipping. So I tossed this book in. The book sat on my nightstand for several months and only got busted out over the Christmas break. Which is a shame because it's my favorite find in recent months. But at this point I don't remember the source of the recommendation, or even much about why I dropped it. I think that blog got all heavy political, you know how that was last summer. So sorry mystery blog author who I forget! You should get a shout-out but I'm a slacker.
If you liked the coolhunting aspects of Pattern Recognition, you'll enjoy this book. The protagonist is a young coolhunter who spends a lot of time spotting trends in footwear and advising shoe companies on their advertising. He's not what he calls an "Innovator" - he doesn't create the trends. He watches out for Innovators and pumps the trends back to the big marketing machines. There's a lot of sly commenting on our consumerist culture afoot. He ends up bringing an Innovator into his coolhunting world and then things get . . . complicated in a way I can't explain without spoilers. It's a quick read (his books seem to be classified as "young adult" although I'd say it's a slightly higher reading level than Harry Potter.) and I read it pretty much in one setting. I recommended it strongly to Karin and she seemed to really like it. I had no real preconceptions about this before reading it, but I really quite enjoyed it. I recommend it highly.
So yeah, the book in question is So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield. Embarrassingly, I can't quite explain why I have this book. At some point I read a description of it on a blog and thought the book sounded very cool and dropped it onto my Amazon wishlist. I later decided I didn't like the source blog and dropped it from my reading list. Fast forward several months and I needed one more item to make an order be $25 and have free shipping. So I tossed this book in. The book sat on my nightstand for several months and only got busted out over the Christmas break. Which is a shame because it's my favorite find in recent months. But at this point I don't remember the source of the recommendation, or even much about why I dropped it. I think that blog got all heavy political, you know how that was last summer. So sorry mystery blog author who I forget! You should get a shout-out but I'm a slacker.
If you liked the coolhunting aspects of Pattern Recognition, you'll enjoy this book. The protagonist is a young coolhunter who spends a lot of time spotting trends in footwear and advising shoe companies on their advertising. He's not what he calls an "Innovator" - he doesn't create the trends. He watches out for Innovators and pumps the trends back to the big marketing machines. There's a lot of sly commenting on our consumerist culture afoot. He ends up bringing an Innovator into his coolhunting world and then things get . . . complicated in a way I can't explain without spoilers. It's a quick read (his books seem to be classified as "young adult" although I'd say it's a slightly higher reading level than Harry Potter.) and I read it pretty much in one setting. I recommended it strongly to Karin and she seemed to really like it. I had no real preconceptions about this before reading it, but I really quite enjoyed it. I recommend it highly.