Good idea, bad decision....

Dear Joshua,

The first book I read for class was a "chosen book." My professor gives us some slack every now and then and lets us choose our own book. She brought a bunch to class and I borrowed one called Feed by M.T. Anderson. The author's name was familiar and I read the summary in the front of the book where all the publication info can be found. (The library at my school takes off all the book jackets and occasionally you can find one perma-bound as long as it was paperback to begin with. I worked at that library for two years and I was still unable to convince these people that we need to take a look at the jacket. But in case you didn’t already know, flip to the publication page and you find a little summary near the bottom.)

Feed sounded pretty cool: Set in the future, everyone has computers in their heads, and (surprise, surprise) it turns out that those computers cause some problems. Titus, the main character, doesn’t really think too much about his Feed because it’s always there anyway. It tells him how much a pair of pants cost, he watches his favorite shows, finds out what the new styles are, etc. It’s all the same stuff we do on the internet know, only there’s no searching involved: the Feed does this automatically. So Titus and his buddies are on the Moon for Spring Break (the Moon is the 51^st state, by the way) and some hacker gets into all of their Feeds and they have to spend some time in a hospital while the doctors and IT dudes figure out what’s going on. During this time they have no Feed so their heads are actually quiet and they have to communicate using the voice instead of chatting (much like IMing). Titus ends up liking this girl who never really liked her Feed to begin with, but is quick to use it again once they all get better. Titus learns a lot from this girl, as she is home schooled by her father who is a throwback to the olden days where books were the main source of education. School has become trademarked and bought up by major companies so students are taught about how to be savvy shoppers instead of understanding current events. We occasionally get a little snippet of current events and things don’t look good: Forests are rare, the world hates the United States, the president is a bumbling idiot, etc. This is a book about a good idea (having a computer at the tip of our minds fingers) gone horribly wrong. People are no longer close and priorities are a little (ok, a lot) mixed up. It’s definitely worth a look.

--Paige