Edward Snowden wrote the intro to the newer edition of Little Brother & Homeland.
Nice. :)
I really enjoyed Walkaway as an intro to Doctorow.
It was a fun exploration of the politics and economic realities of a possible near future where we never really got a firm grip on runaway capitalism. Lots of fun concepts surrounding intellectual property in a post-scarcity world.
His Latest Red Team BLues is a pretty good read, and its the start of a new set of books, so not a bad starting point
I've liked all of his books thus far. His older stuff like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Pirate Cinema, and Makers are what I started out reading. Really, start anywhere. He's also got his blog, Pluralistic, that he writes on just about daily. I get the RSS feed sent to my work email to read when we have downtime.
Books