Audiobook review: Feed by M.T. Anderson

Narrator: David Aaron Baker
Publish date: 2002
Source: Library
Length: 5 hours 10 minutes
"Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now." (Goodreads)

I've had Feed in my classroom library for a while, but could never quite get myself to pick it up and read it. I saw it at the library in audiobook format earlier this year and when I noticed that it was only about 5 hours, I knew that would be how I would read it. I was completely sucked into this strange, strange little book.

Feed is essentially futuristic satire and boy, is it scarily real! In M.T. Anderson's future, everyone has a feed implanted in their brains that affects everything. You can communicate silently, see advertisements, order things, etc. It was scary to think about how this could very well be our future. We have already made so many technological leaps in the last hundred years--what is coming next? Maybe brain feeds!

Audiobook-wise, I think I definitely made the right choice to listen to this one. David Aaron Baker was a fantastic narrator and I loved all of his voices for each character. I also loved the touches the audiobook had like changes in the volume/tone to indicate when characters were communicating via the feed and the commercials to show how often advertisements popped up on the feed. I would highly recommend listening to this over reading the print.