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lolaraincoatHey, look! A post that is not about Remix! Go me!
So, I got an advance copy of Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother the other day, courtesy of Making Light - as if they didn't do me a big enough favor just by existing, now they're giving away books as well. It's as if Go Fug Yourself was also handing out donuts. Anyway, so, partly because of the publisher's brilliant marketing strategy of just giving it away, I'd been hearing good things about the book, and was all excited to read it, and - meh.
Little Brother definitely has its heart in the right place, being a young adult novel about post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties and how much that sucks, but the story gets hijacked by gizmo-worship. It's all, hey kids! here's how to build your own surveillence-free internet on your X-Boxes! here's how to subvert the tracking functions on your bus pass! here's how to have fun with a flash mob! So it ends up being, basically, Wired Magazine Escapes from Guantanamo Bay. Also, the characters are pretty much unbelievable, though maybe they're unbelievable in ways that will appeal to teen readers? I mean, I would be delighted to hand this book to a teen reader this year (it's going to be outdated in approximately ten minutes) and I wasn't sorry I read it and I feel like a heel having snarfed the nice free copy and now complaining about it, but there it is.
Reading Little Brother did make me think that I want to read novels about the characters at its margins - the people stuck in off-shore prisons without habeus corpus rights, the teachers unable to figure out what to say to their students about the national-security state, the military recruiters ... I'm just not as interested in the technologically-empowered (white, male, young) activists. Maybe it's just that I feel like I know their story already.
The winter was long and hard and killed off our poor scraggly little peach tree in the back. The apricot, though, is flourishing - every centimeter of its branches is covered in blossoms right now, with tiny green leaves just starting to show. And I don't think we lost anything else; in fact, we had some unlikely survivors among the herbs, including green sage and golden sage, sorrel and French sorrel, and most of the lavendar in the front. The little rosebushes in front are all putting out leaves too, and most of the bulbs came up. There are two kinds of yellow tulips in front right now. Tulips! Yellow!
So of course this has inspired me to a seasonal frenzy of planting: strawberries, beets, four varieties of onion, basil, and some annual flowers for the front, so far. Next week: tomatoes! and arugala! and more basil!
And then the city came by last week and dug two enormous holes in our front lawn, as part of a watermain-fixing project. Since water is no longer welling up from the middle of the street in front of our house I guess they did fix the water mains, so we went and got a pear tree and lilac bush and a big bag of cow manure and filled up the holes with them today. The front lawn is an awful mess, still, but it will be a green and fragrant mess in about a year from now.
All of this gardening was made complicated by my desire to not drive anywhere this weekend, because of the surprise public transit strike that began midnight Friday. There was going to be a strike last week, but then they called it off, but instead the union went out with less than two hours' notice Friday night. Luckily every one of the eighteen guests who came to dinner on Friday (yes, Ratty, it was a potluck) had carpooled or walked or biked or taken the suburban trains from out of town, so they could all get home all right.
My still-new-ish job, it appears, turns into an eighty-hour-a-week monster in February and March and some of April, and last week was still a very long one, but things are winding down now, so that's good. And it's been interesting - so interesting, in fact, that it will have to wait for a less public post.
So, I got an advance copy of Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother the other day, courtesy of Making Light - as if they didn't do me a big enough favor just by existing, now they're giving away books as well. It's as if Go Fug Yourself was also handing out donuts. Anyway, so, partly because of the publisher's brilliant marketing strategy of just giving it away, I'd been hearing good things about the book, and was all excited to read it, and - meh.
Little Brother definitely has its heart in the right place, being a young adult novel about post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties and how much that sucks, but the story gets hijacked by gizmo-worship. It's all, hey kids! here's how to build your own surveillence-free internet on your X-Boxes! here's how to subvert the tracking functions on your bus pass! here's how to have fun with a flash mob! So it ends up being, basically, Wired Magazine Escapes from Guantanamo Bay. Also, the characters are pretty much unbelievable, though maybe they're unbelievable in ways that will appeal to teen readers? I mean, I would be delighted to hand this book to a teen reader this year (it's going to be outdated in approximately ten minutes) and I wasn't sorry I read it and I feel like a heel having snarfed the nice free copy and now complaining about it, but there it is.
Reading Little Brother did make me think that I want to read novels about the characters at its margins - the people stuck in off-shore prisons without habeus corpus rights, the teachers unable to figure out what to say to their students about the national-security state, the military recruiters ... I'm just not as interested in the technologically-empowered (white, male, young) activists. Maybe it's just that I feel like I know their story already.
The winter was long and hard and killed off our poor scraggly little peach tree in the back. The apricot, though, is flourishing - every centimeter of its branches is covered in blossoms right now, with tiny green leaves just starting to show. And I don't think we lost anything else; in fact, we had some unlikely survivors among the herbs, including green sage and golden sage, sorrel and French sorrel, and most of the lavendar in the front. The little rosebushes in front are all putting out leaves too, and most of the bulbs came up. There are two kinds of yellow tulips in front right now. Tulips! Yellow!
So of course this has inspired me to a seasonal frenzy of planting: strawberries, beets, four varieties of onion, basil, and some annual flowers for the front, so far. Next week: tomatoes! and arugala! and more basil!
And then the city came by last week and dug two enormous holes in our front lawn, as part of a watermain-fixing project. Since water is no longer welling up from the middle of the street in front of our house I guess they did fix the water mains, so we went and got a pear tree and lilac bush and a big bag of cow manure and filled up the holes with them today. The front lawn is an awful mess, still, but it will be a green and fragrant mess in about a year from now.
All of this gardening was made complicated by my desire to not drive anywhere this weekend, because of the surprise public transit strike that began midnight Friday. There was going to be a strike last week, but then they called it off, but instead the union went out with less than two hours' notice Friday night. Luckily every one of the eighteen guests who came to dinner on Friday (yes, Ratty, it was a potluck) had carpooled or walked or biked or taken the suburban trains from out of town, so they could all get home all right.
My still-new-ish job, it appears, turns into an eighty-hour-a-week monster in February and March and some of April, and last week was still a very long one, but things are winding down now, so that's good. And it's been interesting - so interesting, in fact, that it will have to wait for a less public post.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-27 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-28 02:33 am (UTC)