Hacking is the new Planking
And what is the deal with planking anyways?
Our generation. These are the people who will supposedly save the messed up world that our parents left us.
*So bookchomper does care about eco stuff…*
Eh. There’s a big difference between “acknowledge” and “care”. I’m just “acknowledging” that humans don’t want to clean up the gazillion year mess (pollution, global warming, ozone layer, etc.) in their room (poor Earth).
Boy I’m in a black mood. (oh, BTW, Black Friday Pepper Spray woman? O.o)
While in Maui, I got bored after days of boogieboarding and lying listlessly on the beach like a vegetable, so I decided to start reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, one of the books that Jaion recommended me when we went “shopping”.
Image via Wikipedia
It’s about teenage hackers who get suspected (and tortured) as accomplices in a recent terrorist attack in San Francisco. They didn’t have anything to do with the terrorist attack, but boy, are they awesome hackers.
It was good. It made me want to hack. That didn’t turn out too well, but I’ll let you laugh about that later.
This is a book for teenagers, but there’s no sparkly vampires, and no depressed, angsty romance stuff. The only romance stuff was very well done I would say. The writing is pure “teenager”, but the content? Politics, Rebellion, Trust, Government, Friendship, Torture, Prison, and late-night hacking are all in here, and it rocked my socks off. Apparently there are a couple of books with a similar plotline, but man, this one’s gonna stay in my brain for a while. Not only was the fear so tangible that cold sweat ran down the sides of my nose on a TROPICAL BEACH, but the pulse of the book was present 100% of the time. The only reason I didn’t read the whole thing in one sitting was that my contacts were drying up from all the staring.
I think Leadership was a big theme. The main character is a 17-year old hacker kid whose memories of torture by the DHS haunt him throughout the book– yet he still finds the courage to lead a rebellion against the government. And many times he realizes how many people are looking to him for leadership, and is scared out of his mind. But he never runs away. (well, one time he was close) He cries like a baby at some points, but he never runs away. This is the acceptance of fear being witnessed. It’s very interesting.
Anyways, the one thing that sucked wasn’t the book’s fault, it was mine. There was tons of explanations about hacker and computer stuff that mostly went right over my head the first time I read the passage. I basically only got 70% of the terms and concepts explained throughout, and that’s after reading them over and over again. I can tell they were explained really well, I’m just a doody-head.
Well, that’s it. The details about the setting, San Francisco, were surprisingly good. I’m going to be looking out for Mr. Doctorow in the future, and you should too, judging on Little Brother.
7
~By the way, don’t be a dumb human like me and buy it on kindle before realizing that Little Brother is free online under a Creative Commons License. Here, I’m making SURE you’re not going to be a dumb human: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
Related articles
- Can Hacking Be A Financial Instrument? (essayboard.com)
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- Black Friday pepper spray suspect surrenders in LA (sfgate.com)
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bookworm4evr
Jazmine Baker
lightningwind
Condor
Such a good book! I’ve read a bunch of Doctorow’s stuff over the years, and what I love about his YA books is that he doesn’t talk down to teens. He expects teens to break the rules, to break out of their safe little world. I don’t usually go for YA, but I’ve enoyed both Little Brother and For the Win.
So true. I think it comes from Doctorow still being a kid inside of an adult body. I mean, his personal website’s name is craphound. AND, he wore a red cape and funky glasses when he received a book award as homage to an XKCD comic that featured him: http://xkcd.com/345/
Anyways, visited your blog and loved it! If I may, I am going to steal your review index, cuz I really need one.
~Bookchomper
I’ll trade you the infamous XKCD Doctorow t-shirt for my index.
but srsly, steal away.