Star Rating: ***** (5/5 Stars)

I’m consistently impressed by Cory Doctorow. I also think it is important to know a little bit about him and his background in order to fully appreciate his books. Doctorow is a blogger, a geek, a computer and gadget guy, a character in XKCD, and one of the champions of the Creative Commons movement. If you don’t know what that is you should go check out the website HERE. He is outspoken and knowledgeable about copyright and open source issues. His nonfiction is, in my opinion, at least as good a read as his fiction.

That said, his fiction is excellent. Little Brother is an updated 1984. Most of George Orwell’s inventions actually exist in the world now, but when they were conceived they were just that: conceptions of what the world might look like someday. Doctorow does the same thing, and his imagined near-future world is terrifyingly plausible. 

His characters live in what is essentially a police state, where Americans are kept docile by the nebulous threat of terrorism. When a teenage hacker, Marcus, experiences the illegal and unjust practices of Doctorow’s Department of Homeland Security firsthand, he decides to take down the government using his cracked Xbox. Doctorow does a good job of exploring all of the ways a decision like that is terrifically stupid, and also the ways in which it is incredibly smart. Marcus doesn’t get away with anything just by virtue of being the protagonist, he has to work to achieve each tiny victory, running the risk of imprisonment without trial if his identity is discovered. 

Little Brother is about revolution, surveillance, hacking, and the power of the people. It’s not hard to see where Doctorow got his ideas. All you need to do is look around. Much of the technology he writes about exists already. Doctorow is good at explaining complex technical subjects in ways that make sense to the uninitiated. I know nothing about cryptography, but his descriptions of how it works made sense to me, and he interspersed the technical stuff with a lot of interesting true history. Do not be put off.  It was a great book with a chilling message: you are being watched. Read it with attention to detail.

“you’ve missed me.”
“hardly.”

alina starkov & zoya nazyalensky belong to leigh bardugo.
that iconic photo of jessie & sujaya was used as reference.
please do not repost or edit.

trust in yourself, phoenix.

zofia belongs to roshani chokshi.
please do not repost or edit.

For the first time in a long time I’m asking for book recommendations. I’ve read a couple Murakami books recently and would love something light hearted and fun to read. Could also be serious but was thinking YA lit because they are my favorite. I also adore well written books that almost read like poetry. I.e. Jellicoe Road and The Sky Is Everywhere.

Thanks in advance!

“Jean,” he said. “Hey, Jean. Jean Valjean. Hey. Hey. Hello.”

-Aftg, Nora Sakavic

I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I appreciate this lesmis reference in Trk. I LOVED IT

So I basically forced my guy friend to read the Raven boys

and he came running to class today screaming „Noah is Czerny AND he is actually dead! This is awesome!!“ Through the day he read and he finished it. The first thing he said to me after finishing the book was „What the f does Ronan mean when he’s saying he took chainsaw out of his dreams?!!!“ Now he’s reading the shit out of the rest of the series

if i had a nickel for every time a guy with a tail had an enemies-to-lovers arc, i’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?

Short version: Maggie makes the difficult transition from home school to public high school, made more difficult by the fact that up until that point her friends had only been her three brothers.  At school she discovers that her brothers have history she knew nothing about.  All the while she is haunted by a silent ghost from the town’s maritime urban legend.

What I thought: There’s a lot going on in Maggie’s story, everything from a recent divorce to a sort-of new crush to new friends to local history.  It feels like it could make for a more interesting text novel than a graphic one.  I liked that Maggie herself does grow up a little over the course of the story, but not in any profound way like the old genre of buildingsroman usually does.  Yes she does eventually make a stand and take responsibility for certain things in her life, but it’s done very easily and she doesn’t learn a thing about consequences.
I guess what bugged me is that it has such a great setup, and such cute art (the same lady who brought us Adventures of Superhero Girl), but after more than half the volume, the plot hasn’t really taken off, and once it does, it falls back again fairly quickly and benignly.  They spend a lot of time puzzling on what’s the Big Secret that made her oldest brother and new crush such hostile enemies, and the reason for it ends up being so boring I read that part over to make certain I hadn’t missed some subtext, but nope, just garden-variety conflict.  I thought it would be something actually worth their reactions and glares, maybe something humiliating or the crush mistreated someone in a truly unforgivable fashion, but turns out he was just kind of rude a couple times.
The ghost.  Why was there a ghost at all?  They never find out what the ghost wanted, and she mostly served to represent Maggie’s absent mother, without being actually connected to her.  Maggie does try to help the ghost find peace, but the only thing she could think of didn’t work, and the ghost never says anything or offers closure.  Frustrating for everyone. 
Also frustrating was the fact that Maggie blames herself for her parents’ divorce, and the only people who know that she does either don’t care about the pain that misconception causes her, or actually agree with her.  That’s never touched on either, and we’re left with no more closure than with the ghost.
Overall it was okay, I like Hicks as an artist and I like her understanding of the everyday struggle, but this one felt like it needed to be either longer or a different medium.

Read it if you liked: Mercuryby Hope Larson, Adventures of Superhero Girl, also by Faith Erin Hicks, Scott Pilgrim vs the World by Brian Lee O’Malley, anything by John Green.

Short version: Anda is invited to join an all-girls guild in an MMORPG very like World of Warcraft.  While there she and another member of the guild take it upon themselves to “clean out” the gold farmers– players who do nothing but sell game resources for real world cash.  Anda accidentally befriends one of the gold farmers she had meant to kill, only to discover that the player behind the avatar is a teen like herself, working the gold farm in China under harsh conditions.  She is left with the ethical decision to help him and the others in his “office,” which risks alienating herself and losing him his job.

What I thought:  I have quite a positive opinion here, but a few details nipped at me.  In the very beginning of the story, the guild recruiter calls herself “one of the first girl gamers”–I strongly doubt that.  The stereotype of the male gamer who has nothing but contempt for female gamers is there for a reason, but women and girls have been defying that stigma ever since there have been games, of any sort, not just online.  Now that’s out of the way, I can gush.
What a great story!  I loved that the plot really addresses the global aspect of online gaming, how it puts players in touch who would otherwise never have met, makes friends across continental borders, and opens eyes to other ways of living.  Anda has sympathy for her Chinese friend’s predicament, and unthinkingly gives him the advice that she would give to an American in the same position, unaware that things are very different in China, with very different consequences for failure.  In addition to that, she slowly comes to grasp the notion that bullying is not always obvious, and that it’s possible to take part in it without knowing.
What I liked most had to do with Doctrow taking the absolute best part of online game philosophy and running with it, namely the fact that the person you play in the game is a perfect version of yourself.  On the surface that means Anda’s avatar has a beautiful body and dresses well, she’s agile and skilled, she is good at her job and is under nobody’s control.  In the real world, she lives by her mother’s rules, she wears the same frumpy sweater every day, she’s shy and doesn’t have the courage to stand up for others.
But then something wonderful happens: her avatar starts doing the right thing, she helps the Chinese players and accepts the blame when it goes badly, then fixes what she messed up even though it means going to a lot of trouble.  Slowly, her avatar becomes a better version of Anda herself, and the two start to blend, first with Anda dying her hair to match her avatar’s, then with an attitude adjustment that makes her a better person in real life.
So this is a great story for girls, especially the ones who spend a lot of time online or could be classified as “millennials” by people who use the word distastefully.  It’s a good one for anyone who games online, male or female, as a how-to guide on the right way to behave towards your fellow humans, even if you never see their face.

Read if you liked: Lumberjanesby Noelle Stevenson, Fangirlby Rainbow Rowell, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, .hack (Dot Hack) by Koichi Mashimo