The Last Book in the Universe question

When I read the description of this book, I was excited. The back cover describes a world in which nobody reads anymore because pleasant experiences, places, and people can be directly injected into the brain via “probes”. I was pretty sure that I knew where this was going, and prepared myself to read a thinly veiled critique of modern technology as a poor replacement for book learning. Even though this would be an obvious and preachy moral, I looked forward to indulging in what looked like an easy read that would reaffirm my ideals.

I was surprised to find myself so disoriented from the beginning. Philbrick inundates the reader with unfamiliar lingo that he has designed for the book, and several terms are capitalized; “Stackbox”, the “Pipe”, the “Urb”, “backtimer”, and the “Big Shake”, are all introduced within the first paragraph, without any introduction, explanation, or frame of reference. This soured me at first, but after a few pages, I began to figure out what these terms meant. They were elements of a very grim, dystopian society: the Urb.

The Urb is comprised of several “latches”, which are essentially separate districts that are loosely maintained by latch leaders. These leaders act as tyrants, and they raid the “stacks”, which are concrete dwellings where starving, desperately poor civilians squat. The latch leaders and their followers steal whatever they want for themselves from the stack dwellers. These leaders also frequently indulge in “probing”, a sort of virtual reality process that transports their minds to Eden, a real paradise that exists in the center of the Urb. The denizens of Eden are known as “proovs”, as they are genetically improved at birth to be remarkably beautiful and intelligent. The Urb residents are known as “normals”, and not only are they forbidden from navigating between latches, but they are very strictly forbidden from traveling to Eden.

The protagonist, an adolescent male, has been named Spaz, because he has epilepsy and is prone to frequent seizures. Because people are uneducated, they fear that Spaz’s condition is somehow contagious, and he is largely shunned. One day, when seeking to pillage the stacks per the latch leader’s orders, Spaz meets an old man named Ryter, who changes his life completely. While I found myself largely frustrated with Spaz, who remains bitter, stubborn, and pessimistic through most of the novel, Ryter proves a loveable and courageous character that I enjoyed watching; in turn, he kept forcing me to give Spaz another chance. In the end, Ryter was right, of course, and I celebrated as Spaz finally learned how to create his own hope.

I would consider teaching this text in the classroom. It would seem that teens are increasingly interested in reading about dystopian societies, and this one in particular garners a strong sense of appreciation and of wonder for the beautiful world that we live in. My main concern comes from my own initial struggles with deciphering the new language and terminology that Philbrick introduces. Will teens have the patience to allow themselves to trudge through the rapid-fire of unfamiliar terms until they understand? If I did teach the book, I would probably need to read the first couple chapters with my students and lead a discussion about what they imagine when they read about this strange world.