Paranoia...or Prophecy?

So lately I have not been doing much except sitting around and reading...which might sound like the enth degree of hell to most people, but I have come out of this very relaxed--even if does ruin my vision.

I have read two books in the past two weeks, which is actually pretty slow for me. I must be getting slower in my old age. The first book I read was called Feed. I read this for a very specific reason. I have this kooky idea that I might want to do a futuristic fiction unit with my English 11 Honors students next year, taking a page from a class I took in college. The class was titled, "Futuristic Fiction: Paranoia or Prophecy?" In all honesty, the class did little else but scare the sh** out of me. We read fiction that was set in the future; all stories were in communities where the government had tried to perfect society by using a number of frightening devices, most frightening of which was brain washing. We read A Brave New World, 1984, The Time Machine, The Handmaid's Tale, Frankenstein, and a few others that I didn't get to. Then, this professor (a beatnik-poet-version of Bruce Willis--I had a slight crush on him), who was an extremely dynamic lecturer, would flood us with articles from Newsweek, Time, and the newspaper of instances that were parallel to these dystopian societites that we were reading about. It was a very harrowing hour and a half. Several times I left convinced that we were being brainwashed on every side, that 9/11 was a scam by the government to get the idotic, patriotic citizens to voluntarily forfeit their constututional rights (just like in Handmaid's Tale), and that the Pledge of Allegiance is actually a governmental ploy to brainwash all of us into a flag-waving frenzy. And I was further convinced that we didn't realize this was happening to all of us, becuase the government was feeding the media all of this "we have to be beautiful to matter" propganda to get us sidetracked and to believe that beauty is the only thing that mattered in the world. It was an intense class. In fact, one day, after a very heated discussion of A Brave New World, where the people in this society were bred to be beautiful, and anytime anyone questioned anything other than the newest fashion trend they were given a shot of feel-good meds, and were obsessed with sex, I left class only to go to a friend's house to watch American Idol. The first thing I saw on the screen was a gelled Ryan Sechrest with a shirt that read "Beauty Qualifies Me." I began to hyperventilate.

Anyway, the point is, the class sincerely scared me, and apparently left an impact. Why wouldn't I want to freak my students out? So I think I'm going to talk about perfect socities, and all that jazz, complete with a chopped down reading of Plato's Republic. I want the students to read YA literature in the same vein, so I was trying to develope a list of dystopian books. After a short Google search, I found Feed. So, like any good teacher, I read it first.

I was apalled. And I don't apall easily. F-word here, F-word there, the story was disjointed, and the characters were deplorable. The sad thing was, I could picture any number of my students sounding and acting like these teens. Anyway, the book was gross. I don't recommend it, unless you are already VERY desistized--I thought I was. Aparently not. Anway, I was going to write about the other book I read, but I got off on a tangent...the other book, The Robber Bride, is really good. A few F words there, but not excessive, and not gratuitous. I'll leave that book review next time.