Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

Titus and his friends are products of the Feed: a never-ending stream of advertising and information implanted into their brains. During an ordinary trip to the Moon, Titus meets the smart, beautiful Violet. When a protester hacks their minds, the teens lose contact with the Feed and for the first time get an inkling that there may be a better way to live.

As unsettling and soul-scarring as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Feed is one of those novels that will grow in your subconscious long after you've finished it. Titus is as self-absorbed as Holden Caulfield, but far less articulate. Titus's dystopia is much more Brave New World than 1984, where the affluent are lulled into lives of mindless consumption. Hairstyles change within hours, the oozing lesions everyone has developed become a fashion statement, and School is a trademark, not a place.

Stray observations:

• The pulsing red fields of filet mignon that Titus thinks are part of nature have never quite left my psyche. *Queasiness*
• TV show from the Feed: Oh? Wow! Thing!
• Song lyrics for a love song from the Feed: I like you so bad / And you like me so bad. / We are so bad / It would be bad / If we did not get together, baby, / Bad baby, / Bad, bad baby. / Meg bad.
• "That's one of the great things about the feed - that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit." - 47