The Curious Curator's Book Blog

But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

This was the second Cory Doctorow book I read, the first having been Little Brother. Pirate Cinema is a YA novel set in Britain in the near future, and, like Little Brother, it takes an important contemporary issue - copyright laws in the age of the Internet - and explores a possible dystopian future.

It sounded great in theory, specially because open culture is a topic that's very close to my heart. Unfortunately, I was majorly disappointed by this book.

To start off, it's just so similar to Little Brother - the tone, the plot, the characters, their personalities, even their hobbies or food preferences. It reminded me a bit of reading Dan Brown's books: you read one, then you read another, and it feels like you are reading the same book over and over again, with only a few differences (by the way, it pains me to do this comparison, because I love Doctorow's ideas, and Dan Brown's... well, not so much). Because they were so similar, I found myself comparing the two more than I should, and this one definitely pales next to Little Brother.

Still, this book discusses some very pertinent ideas in an accessible way, so it's not a total disaster. But I would recommend skipping this one and trying out one of Cory Doctorow's other works.