Recent Reads: Feed (Book #8 of 2013)

Feed by M.T. Anderson served as book 8/52 this year, and what a strange addition to my list it was.
I hadn’t heard of it until I was perusing the 3.99 and under section of my Kindle. It had some pretty good reviews both on Amazon and Goodreads, so I decided to go ahead and purchase it for 2.99. I’m glad I did!

Our narrator is Titus, a teenage boy who decides to go to spring break on the moon with his friends. Yes, the moon. The story takes place sometime in the future. The reader never finds out just how far ahead in the future. It appears that anything is possible. The most important part of the story is that people have chips in their brains that serve as their computer/internet/cell phones. There is no need for these devices when everything can happen inside the human brain. Things get interesting when Titus and his friends meet Violet, a girl who is alone on the moon, and they go to a nightclub, only to have their feeds hacked by an older man, and all it takes is a simple touch on the shoulder.
This causes them to be hospitalized, their feeds temporarily disconnected.
Okay, I can’t even explain this anymore.

There are so many themes in this book. It messed with my head a lot because I read it on my Kindle, and I had just gotten my iPhone 5. It really drove the point home how involved I am in my technological devices. It just seemed very realistic, and it was frightening. This book isn’t funny. The characters have only really known a life with a chip literally feeding their minds with what they should buy and watch and how they should be. On top of it all, the brain is so dependent on this chip and this feed that it doesn’t know how to survive without it. So, yeah. It’s intense. A great commentary on a possibility in our futures and how involved with consumerism and technology our lives have become and could become. I would definitely recommend this book. It’s not long, but it really gives you something to think about.

For more help in understanding the themes and slang of the book, I referred to this Wikipedia page.