Chapter One Hundred Thirteen: Feed

So Feed by M.T. Anderson is a book I've been meaning to read for a while for several reasons.  I had been vaguely meaning to read it because in the school library where I worked last year, there were several copies, so it seems like a big YA title and I wanted to know what it was all about.  Then, this year, a teenager I know recommended I read it.  (This was months ago!)  And I've honestly been meaning to read it since, but I just kept being busy.  But finally the time was ripe for me to read Feed, which is a book that really has nothing to do with food--I don't know about you, but to me the title conjures images of huge piles of animal-grade dried corn off the cob sliding around industrial farms.  This is totally misleading.  Basically, the feed in this book refers to a sort of computer implanted directly into the brain, so it's a feed in the sense of a web feed, like an RSS or like the push notifications on smartphones.
Feed  is written in this really convincing slangy prose--I can totally imagine teenagers of the future (and of today) talking how Anderson has written Feed.  In this way, but in no other, it reminds me of an updated Catcher in the Rye (a book of which I am not at all fond, I will note).  And this grim future is fairly believable--that's what makes it, at heart, so depressing, at least to me.  Feed provides a creepy and pretty bleak view of a potential future of the U.S., providing what almost amounts to a reducto ad absurdium of fears about the increasing role of computers in everyday life.   It is done really well--it never feels like a lecture or like there's too much exposition or description at the expense of plot.  Anderson just slips in all of these little details that you have to pay attention to about the state of affairs in this bleak future U.S. and world, so the enormity of the situation only ever creeps up on you from the side, making it much more powerful than if Anderson described it directly. But it's not depressing in a way that makes me regret having read the book--the aforementioned recommender was right to suggest it to me, and I similarly urge anyone to read it, whether you're usually into YA sci-fi or not.  Give it a chance even (or especially) if it's not your usual scene, because it provides a lot of food for thought, as it were.

Chapter One Hundred Twelve: Boy: Tales of Childhood AND Going Solo

Boy: Tales of Childhood and Going Solo are Roald Dahl's autobiographies, intended for children--the audience he is perhaps best-known for writing for, although he also wrote works intended for adults.  Anyway, I don't know why I'd never read these autobiographies before, because I love everything by Roald Dahl that I've read so far (which is not all of his work, not by any means, but I'll get around to it all eventually).  So Roald Dahl actually had this really fascinating life!  I guess that's not surprising--he had to get all those fantastic story ideas from somewhere, so it makes sense that he might have done a lot of interesting things to get those ideas.  Boy focuses on his childhood, up to the age of 18; mostly it relates his days in various boarding schools, which sound fairly miserable (especially the beatings), but also fun times like summer family trips to Norway, and some hairy medical experiences (having his nose almost ripped off his face in a car crash; having his adenoids out without general anesthetic).  Going Solo focuses on his life after he left boarding school: he decided he wanted to see the world, and the best way to do that was to go and work for a large company with many foreign branches.  So he ended up getting a job with Shell Oil that sent him to eastern Africa, to what is now Tanzania.  And then while he was there, World War Two broke out, so he joined the RAF as a pilot and had all sorts of adventures and a horrific injury as well, which he obviously survived or he wouldn't have been able to go on to become a famous writer.  Going Solo ends when he finally returns back to his mother's home from the war, and it is quite possibly one of the most moving ends to a book I've yet read.  Mostly Boy and Going Solo take a humorous or at least light tone, even when the content is a bit heavy--Dahl is a master of that sort of thing, after all--but the end was quite moving, which I wasn't expecting but which I really appreciated.  For anyone who wants to learn about Roald Dahl as a person, or about one man's experience growing up in Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, or about his experience as a fighter pilot in the RAF during WWII in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, or for anyone who just wants an interesting story about an interesting life, I'd highly recommend Boy and Going Solo.