OptionalBooks

Every One Should Be Reading This

Ah yes, the internet memes of 2016: Fidget spinners, a dead pet bee, America's dictator, and Harambe (rest in peace). Every single tweet, vine, and tumblr post that we obsessed over back then has only grown in relevancy. Oh wait, it hasn't.

The first half of this book describes every single post that the protagonist scrolls through daily. Often these are just a couple of sentences until the paragraph breaks and the next post begins. In that style it perfectly encapsulates the speed of our social media feeds.

But the feed is from 2016. Does that mean the book is out of date? The book was published in 2021. The outdated feed is part of the point. As such the experience of reading it will warp over time, but it will not lose it's relevancy. While reading about all these memes the reader will recognize a few or even most of them depending on the amount of time they themselves spent online in 2016. But at least some will be foreign, but still embedded in the feed with all the others. And you will be forced to evaluate whether this unknown post about some woman screaming in some store and that then-important post about the cultural origin of fidget spinners might both have never been relevant to your life at all.

This first “internet” half of the book is excellent in itself. But in the second half the narrator experiences a tragedy in her own personal life and is violently jerked into reality where she needs to (wants to?) confront this situation.

An empathetic critique of social media obsession and an exploration of grief in a fast moving age.

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