I just read this earlier this year, but it was too good not to revisit and it’s just as good in epub as it was in audiobook. Love this book.

I’m a couple of days late on writing this post: I started listening to the audiobook within hours of Doctorow sending out Kickstarter rewards on Monday and had it finished within a day. I often introduce Doctorow to others by saying that his books sometimes read like op-eds—but that that’s a good thing. I found that to be true in this book. I don’t know that I liked it as much as Walkaway (though I never expected to like that one!), and I’m honestly not sure I followed all of the plot details (my fault, not the author’s). Despite all of this, I couldn’t help but give this full marks. The point of the story is clear, inviting righteous indignation about poverty and wealth; the characters and world are lovingly detailed in a way that made it come alive; finally, Wil Wheaton’s performance is excellent and only made the whole thing stronger (also, the end credits cracked me up). It’s only been two days since I finished it, but my next audiobook is still on hold on Libby, and I’ve been seriously considering giving this one another listen while I wait.

To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.

I bounced pretty hard off of Walkaway a year or so ago, but I recently decided to give it another try. I felt like I needed a boost of hopeful thinking, and I’d seen Doctorow post about the book as being hopeful. Did it ever deliver! Walkaway is hopeful on a nearly religious level, and it was exactly what I needed. The book is not naïvely optimistic but rather tenacious in its belief that we can still make this a better workd. The audiobook was excellent, too, which I think made it easier to get back into it—and to read it so relatively quickly.

I’m generally a fan of Doctorow’s writing—his recent collection of novellas (“Radicalized”) is one of my favorites and I also own his entire “Little Brother” trilogy. This collection of stories just didn’t land for me, though, and there are other stories/books of his that felt the same.

I wonder if his weirder, more optimistic stories don’t work for me in the same way his bleak ones do. This collection dates to 2007, and while Doctorow has long been a critic of certain uses of technology, there are some stories in here that seem like they have more faith in the future of tech than I think is warranted in a post-Snowden, post-Cambridge Analytica world.