Having picked up a couple of the more epic novels from my ongoing reading list, it has admittedly been a few weeks since I’ve finished one and needed to sit down for a quick review. But something inspired me last week to divert my attention and pick up the copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother that had been beckoning from my shelf. Technically a Young Adult novel, I breezed through it in a couple of weekend and evening sessions, aided by the fast-paced and engrossing plot.

The mini-review:

Have you read Orwell’s 1984? If you have not, do. It’s a classic Then go out and pick up a copy of Little Brother and read that: it’s 1984 mixed with a dash of Coupland-esque characters, modern technology, governments and paranoia, and all set to the soundtrack of Green Day’s American Idiot. And you just want to keep reading because the morally ambiguous protagonist kinda deserved what he got, but you know… not really, at all, actually. And having just passed through the last eight years, the story didn’t seem all that far fetched when you sit there and then, you know, thought about it. Admittedly I have a thing for dystopian ficiton, and when you wrap that in the creative commons, open-source mentality that is Doctorow’s style reading this felt good and right, even though it was frustrating and depressing too. Any book that can do that is worth your weekend, I think.