utter randomonium

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (unabridged audiobook read by Kirby Heyborne; 12 hrs on 10 discs): I’ve been meaning to read this for some time now, but when I saw on the cover that it had been blurbed by both Neil Gaiman and Scott Westerfeld, well, I decided I simply could not wait any longer. When San Francisco is attacked by terrorists, Marcus and his friends find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and immediately detained by the Department of Homeland Security, where they are interrogated and tortured. This terrible and unjust treatment motivates Marcus to try to beat the system, creating a separate and untraceable internet using a fictional XBox network. There’s a lot of discussion of how much privacy and freedom one can sacrifice in the name of security, and a lot of questions are raised about how many of these intrusive security measures actually make us any safer. I can see some folks dismissing the whole tale as far too paranoid, but I think it’s still an important book to read, if only as a starting point to a conversation about the larger issues of liberty and security and terrorism. I do not have any answers, but I appreciate any book that makes me want to learn more about the world around me.

A note on the audio: Heyborne is fantastic. That is all.