Feed by M.T. Anderson

Blue from my book group has brought this selection to the table several times, but so far it has been eliminated in our voting process. After several months of this (yes, months - we are a persistent group), curiosity go the better of me and I picked it up as a audio book from the library for my drive down to the Cities and back (for a SciFi Convention no less!).

This was curiously...different. It is considered juvenile fiction (ages 14+) but I seriously think this should be 16+ due to language and "mild adult situations".

I've cut and pasted the GoodReads.com description below. I just don't have a good way to summarize this peculiar and interesting book:

"This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.

Anderson gives us this world through the voice of a boy who, like everyone around him, is almost completely inarticulate, whose vocabulary, in a dead-on parody of the worst teenspeak, depends heavily on three words: "like," "thing," and the second most common English obscenity. He's even made this vapid kid a bit sympathetic, as a product of his society who dimly knows something is missing in his head. The details are bitterly funny--the idiotic but wildly popular sitcom called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", the girls who have to retire to the ladies room a couple of times an evening because hairstyles have changed, the hideous lesions on everyone that are not only accepted, but turned into a fashion statement. And the ultimate awfulness is that when we finally meet the boy's parents, they are just as inarticulate and empty-headed as he is, and their solution to their son's problem is to buy him an expensive car."

Titus, the main character, meets Violet on the Moon, and through her he learns there is a world beyond what's being pumped into his empty head. Violet knows how to write on actual paper, and she knows several "languages" (computer languages). She has an interest in the world beyond the domes and dead seas they live in. Violet wants to experience things beyond the Feed.

I really enjoyed this book. It was my first audio book and it was a positive experience. The actor did a great job conveying the apathy and emotion of the various characters in the dialog. Now I just need to join Blue in convincing the rest of the book group to give this one a try...