Olivia Sudjic’s debut novel is Sympathy. At the Guardian, she tagged five of the best books to get a grip on internet addiction, including:Novels are under threat from the internet, we’re told, as attention spans become shorter. But the digital world is also inspiring novelists. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) is set in a near-future dystopian New York: the US has become ungovernable; books and privacy are anachronisms; everyone owns a device that can live-stream thoughts (a version of this has since been created at MIT) and enables a fully quantified self, from health to hotness. Shteyngart seizes on nascent fears of online addiction and the internet’s dark side. RevisitingRead about another entry on the list.it now, the book reads less like science fiction, more like an account of a Faustian pact we’ve already made.
Super Sad True Love Story appears on Leslie Berlin's top ten list of books about high-tech, Corey J. White's list of five books about the collapse of New York City, Ginni Chen's list of seven books that belong on your social media–obsessed friend’s shelf, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the best--and more familiar--tropes in fiction, Charlie Jane Anders's lists of ten great science fiction novels, published since 2000, that raise huge, important questions and ten satirical novels that could teach you to survive the future, and Nicholas Carr's list of five notable books on the impact of the Information Age.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
