Drat this working for a living all to heck.

Spook Country is very good.  Here is the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country).  It is a political thriller [1], and while the wikipedia entry says there was some disappointment with the plot, I would say that people who are looking for plot to take the centre stage in a William Gibson novel are missing the point.  The characters are interesting, the puzzle is sufficiently unguessable that one continues happily discovering bits, and the prose is amazing.

Also the world-building is so appealing.  All things that happen, happen for human reasons without any hand-wavium.

I have recently also read Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) 1992 and The Eye in the Pyramid, part of The Illuminatus Trilogy (Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson) 1975.  Snow Crash has a very clever opening that is a treasure of misdirection, and it has some very interesting and appealing characters, but its central premise, the method by which chaos is strewn through the virtual world, is never believable.  The Illuminatus Trilogy is humour that has dated badly, and was probably not very funny to begin with, but its wheels-within-wheels puzzle leads one to read on in hopes of improvement (it doesn't, so that's why I have only read the first book of the trilogy).

What's interesting is that both are exploring a what-if (not the same what-if) of the decline in the American social fabric.  SC takes us on a journey from California to the Pacific Northwest, in search of real world manifestations of cyberworld malefalence.  TIT is a romp [2]  through all the cold war spy tropes in search of conspiracies, much of it in New York.

Spook Country takes all the good bits (okay, Snow Crash gets a gold star for its opening) of both of these and makes something better than either.  Spook Country has the action start in California and journey up to the Pacific Northwest [3].  There is cyberness overlaid on real world business, and something dangerous comes ashore there.  And there are spies (for Spook Country this is a totally inadequate lable for what is being described, but I don't have something better to use) galore.  But the spy network has transmogrified and is being used by many people for multiple purposes.  The behaviour is antiquated, but the technology is cutting edge - and the people are very very good at what they do.  Which is the same for the cyber/virtual/net/web/world thing.  The technology is the latest, but the motivation of the people using it is not any more sophisticated than spies protecting gold (James Bond, Gold Finger - original "thriller" "romp") - but the people are very very good at what they do.

Okay - I know that both Snow Crash and The Illuminatus Trilogy were/are Science Fiction [4], and meant to be cut some suspension of disbelief slack on that account; and Spook Country is apparently all about today, and now, and just being a novel of the present - but it makes the present so strange that it reads like science fiction.  It is very good.

Try it - you'll like it.

[1] - which I have just realized a publish-speak for a puzzle book without a murder at the centre - meaning that we use" thriller" to mean spy stories, which may or may not involve murder, but murder is not the puzzle - the puzzle is what the dickens is motivating all these people to exert all this madly rambunctious effort.

[2] - "romp" is another publish-speak word, which dates (& is dated, I might add) from the late 1960's to mid 1970's to mean wild unbridled sex with lots of perfect women who each gracefully withdraw from the narrative post-orgasm - not necessarily hers.

[3] - but in Spook Country the west coast journey ends in Vancouver, where I live, in the part of town that I live in, and it is very weird seeing an author take parts of the city which are real and true, and graft on things that could be true but aren't, and make a totally fictional place that doesn't need to exist anywhere but in the novel for the novel.  Example: I bet Beenies exists somewhere in Vancouver, but it doesn't exist where Gibson puts it, but exactly that kind of restaurant could exist there without any problem at all. 

[4] - okay, yes: the science is about as hard as a post-romp dick, but YKWIM

I've been re-reading this book since Christmas, and I'm on my third go through it.  I often do that with a favorite author's book - keep it at my bedside and read a snip before sleep, and just keep on starting again when I finish.  It is a way to feed my reading habit without letting it steal my sleep on work nights.

While not my absolute favorite Pratchett, it does contain some of my favorite quotes.  Page numbers from the 1997 HarperPrism edition.

10
"Aagragaah," said Detritus mournfully.
"Don't mind me, just don't spit it on my boot," said Vimes.
"It mean--" Detritus waved a huge hand, "like...dem things, what only comes in..." he paused and looked at his fingers, while his lips moved "...fours.  Aagragaah.  It mean lit'rally der time when you see dem little pebbles and you jus' *know* dere's gonna be a great big landslide on toppa you and it already to late to run.  Dat moment, dat's aagragaah."
Vimes's own lips moved.  "*Forebodings*?"
"Dat's der bunny."

152
It was so much easier to blame it on Them.  It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.  If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault.  If it was Us, what did that make Me?  After all, I'm one of Us.  I must be.  I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them.  We're always one of Us.  It's Them that do the bad things.

166
When someone tells you it is your lucky day, something bad is about to happen.

203
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

This is also the book where several (many, lots) what-everybody-knows sayings are put through the ringer and shown to be pretty damn silly.  Mostly though the medium of the Colon and Nobbs Brain Trust (from another book, I think), but others as well.

So basically my review is: if you haven't been reading Pratchett, what the hell are you waiting for?