In my mind, I have been reading this book for about two years now.  In reality, I read half of it two years ago, stuck in a bookmark, and left it on the end table.  For a while it traveled around in the back seat of my car, and I kept meaning to take it into the coffee table with me.  Then I brought it into the house, because we had a big storm coming, and I would want something to read if we lost power.  Once, I took it on a business trip, because I thought I would finish reading it on the plane.

I guess I have to admit to myself that I am never going to finish this book.  Which is a very different thing from bailing on a book halfway through - which, by the way, I do without a qualm all the time.  Life's too short to slog through a book that isn't interesting me.

The problem is that Spook Country IS interesting me.  But it's so terminally filled with ennui and despair that I can only manage a sentence or two at a time before I want to cut my wrists or turn on the television, or both.  

Here, I'll show you what I mean.  Here's a bit from the page where my bookmark has found its permanent home.  

"Odile dropped her bag and started walking toward a curtain of glass wider than an old-fashioned theater screen.  Uprights broke the view at intervals of fifteen feet or so.  Beyond it, from where Hollis stood, there was only an undifferentiated gray-pink glow with a few distant points of red light."

The despair, the emptiness and loneliness in that landscape… I just don't have it in me.

Spook Country reads like a sequel to Neuromancer, which takes place thirty years after the events of that book, and was written by an older, grottier, almost catatonically depressed old man.  It's Neuromancer, without all the energy, charm, humor, or excitement.  And with a lot more regret.

Molly has become Hollis Henry, a destitute former rock star takes a vague and shifty writing contract because they plan to put her up in a hotel, where she can get a decent shower.  Case has become Milgrim, a technical specialist being semi-voluntarily held hostage by a man named Brown.  Milgrim could probably manage to get away, except that he has no money and nowhere to go, and Brown keeps feeding Milgrim his drug of choice from a big brown sack full of pills.  So why go to all the effort to escape?

At one point early on, an elderly woman consults the voodoo gods, who figured highly in Neuromancer.  Not only do they fail to manifest in the flesh, the way they did in Neuromancer, but they fail to tell her anything of interest.  It happens, she explains.  "The orishas may sometimes serve us as oracles, but that doesn't mean they'll tell us much, or even that they'll know what will happen."

She isn't a magical shaman, making contact with the other world.  She's just an elderly woman with religious beliefs, sitting in her kitchen, passing along a massively useless shrug from the gods.

This is where I pantomime knifing myself in the gut.  If the book was written by anyone other than William Gibson, I would eat it up.  But Neuromancer meant so much to me when I was younger, and I just can't bear to see it turned… you know… real.  With real people, doing real things, and walking real streets with shoes that could use a good re-soling.

Which doesn't make it a bad book - quite the contrary.  But does make it a book that I can't bear to finish reading.