If the title of the post doesn’t make any sense to you, I’ll do my best to explain.
DailyLit, is a great site that will email you a few pages of a book every day. These books are all copyright free, either by author choice or due to the fact that they are old enough that the copyright has expired. I started using the service to read Bran Stokers Dracula a few years back.
Little Brother, is the latest book by Cory Doctrow. Doctrow is from Toronto and one of the founders of BoingBoing.net which is a great site for everything do with the internet and culture in general. Doctrow is also big on copyright reform, he has a great short essay you can read on Locust that sums up his views, I strongly recommend you give it a read.
Goodness, is that Doctrow decided to make his brand new book available to DailyLit, even though it had only been in stores for a few months. I subscribed to it, but never got around to reading any of the emails for a few weeks so that 4 chapters had built up in my inbox. Once I got reading it, I just couldn’t stop and immediately ran out to the book store and purchased it. I have a tendency after reading a great book about important issues to make the grand statement of ‘this should be required reading’ and I made that statement after reading this book. The book is a spin on 1984 and Big Brother, dealing with the war on terror in a slightly futuristic America. This book tackles the issue of privacy and freedom in the face of terrorism with a worst case scenerio that doesn’t feel too unbelievable. Benjamin Franklin (coincidently and unrerlated to this book, his biography is next on my reading list) said
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”