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.