Thoughts on Feed

This is my first, and only, post on the book Feed, because I didn’t get the chance to blog at all last week – so, I’ll try to sum up my expectations, feelings, and reflections in one post.

I was initially very excited to read this book. The premise of losing the advanced technology that defines your daily life was exciting. I was ready to connect with the main character (Titus) and watch the parallels of “the feed” and my daily need for technology. I also have always really like sci-fi books and YAL. In short, I was pumped.

My hopes were dashed immediately. I’m not being dramatic, I promise. By immediately I mean the very first sentence. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” From that moment, I understood what M.T. Anderson was trying to do. He decided that to write a book about teenagers, he had to write like a teenager. There is no real skill or imagery in the narrative, just Titus’s perspective. Things that go unexplained really needed to be explained. But in M.T. Anderson’s mind (obviously, I’m speculating) those things are so natural to Titus that it would be unnatural to explain things. The thing that bothered me the most was the “slang” words (which reminded me of Zenon: Girl of the 21^st Century – an old Disney Channel Movie).

I do appreciate the concept Anderson tries to use here, but it just didn’t work. Every time a slang word came up, “meg,” “null,” or “unit,” to name a few, I had to stop, think about the word, and remember its context, meaning, and common use, before I could move on in the story. I usually read books to become immersed and I could not do that AT ALL with this style of writing. Also, when things weren’t explained properly (because it’s from Titus’s point of view after all) I couldn’t picture the scenes as Anderson probably wanted them. I didn’t even understand that homes are inside of some sort of protective bubble on Earth until Titus was describing Violet’s neighborhood.

I’m sure you can infer what my reflections of this book are. I didn’t like it. I understand the literary ideas put into this book, but either they were not used well or they are, frankly, crappy concepts. The actual content of the story – at least what I could understand and retain after getting through the confusing construction – was thought provoking, if a little on-the-nose, so I’m sure Anderson can actually  write, but I honestly never want to read this book ever again.