Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Five top books on self-obsession

Will Storr is an award-winning journalist and novelist. His latest book is Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed.

One of Storr's five best books on self-obsession, as shared at the Guardian:
My favourite novel of our solipsistic times is easily The Nix by Nathan Hill. Laura Pottsdam is a student caught plagiarising by her literature professor, the protagonist of the novel Samuel Andresen-Anderson. Pottsdam is the crushing embodiment of our Trumpian age. Not only entirely unrepentant, she is vengeful, and becomes her professor’s nemesis, all the while keeping her massive social network updated on her mental wellbeing via her iFeel app, which offers a predefined selection of emotional states from which to choose. Her followers can then broadcast their emotional responses to her emotional responses via a convenient auto-response function.

If his debut is anything to go by, Hill may well one day be seen as the Charles Dickens of our self-obsessed age.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue