The Aussie Readers group on Goodreads has the August Challenge – You CAN judge a book by it’s cover!;
This month, your challenge is to read a book or books that you judge SOLELY by their cover! When you have chosen your books, put the covers in this thread, to entice others, and show off your choices:)
I selected my book from the Little Free Library in our Staff Room, specifically because it was a reviewer copy cover.
And the book choice is;
Cory Doctorow – Little Brother (Little Brother #1)
Marcus, a.k.a w1n5t0n, is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Another interesting thing about this book is that you can read the entire book online for free as it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis.
VERDICT: ★★★★
An entertaining read. Little Brother gives a large nod to George Orwell’s 1984 updated to take into account September 11th, the Internet, the DHS and the war on terror. Written for a YA audience the book is also a pretty good read for adults with the story covering good mix of technology, privacy and freedom issues.
I’ve also used this book to have a play with the ‘Notebook’ collection capabilities in springpad.
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