TITLE: Feed
AUTHOR: M. T. Anderson
GENRE: Science Fiction
Rating: 4/5 stars
BLURB: "Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.
For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now."
REVIEW:
Feed was a well-written dystopian novel about a new era of Americans obsessed with the Feed, a microcomputer within your head. Although written in the early 2000s, it still has themes resonating me now, such as how social media can become a constant stream of essentially useless and manipulative information.
(Side-note, I REALLY liked the audiobook version of Feed. There are sections of the book that are advertisements or shows on the feed, and the audiobook does a great job of making them sound futuristic, yet also shining a light on how stupid the products and the shows broadcasted on the feed are. Would 10/10 recommend listening to the audiobook)
WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THE BOOK:
I enjoyed the overall concept and character growth of Violet, the girl Titus meets on the moon. In the blurb of the book, she is portrayed as the cliche “save the crumbling society” girl, but when reading Feed, the I was pleasantly surprised to find out what her personality was truly like. (quirky and interesting!)
I also really liked the setting of Feed and the conceptual ideas of the technological development. I feel like the was also a certain shock factor in noticing similarities between our current world (addiction to social media and a constant feed of fast information) and the world M. T. Anderson created, withe the built in computers/feed in your mind. That shock factor really made the setting more intriguing.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE ABOUT THE BOOK:
To be honest, the made up language that M. T. Anderson used was kind of repetitive and annoying after a while. I understand that the author was probably trying to convey the personalities of the characters as shallow and dumb, and the conversations between characters certainly showed that. However, 200 pages or so interjected frequently with “dadada” and “unit!” are sometimes tiring to read. (Another reason why I enjoyed the audiobook - the reading out loud made the shallow-speak seem more convincing and less redundant)
YOU WOULD LIKE THIS BOOK IF:
You enjoy reading dystopian fiction about futuristic societies.