Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2021 No One is Talking About This is surely going to divide opinion—you’ll either think it’s brilliant or massively overhyped. Put me in the former camp.The first half reads like the Twitter Annual 2017—a sort of memorialisation of the specific memes, banter and humour of a specific tiny period in history. As a not-very-online person, some of these I recognised (remember when everyone in the world read ‘Cat Person’ on the...

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”This one took me by surprise, friends! It is very clever, often humorous, ultimately moving and always compulsively readable. I rarely pick up new releases. I’m not one to jump at the la...

‘A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world.’Doomscrolling, thirst traps, subtweets, chonky bois, stans, sliding into DMs, shouting YAS or saying a MOOD tbh… the landscape of social media has forever altered our lexicon, our politics, our social interactions and more. It’s a rapidly shifting world with a new main character everyday (the goal of twitter, of course, is to remain as active as possible but never BE the main character) and can be an utter minefield of social anxieties...

Internet PoisoningThat the internet is primarily a purveyor of trivia is obvious to anyone. The big revelation is that human life is nothing but trivia. Our access to the trivial lives of others overwhelms the not-trivial which also therefore becomes trivial. We’ve all been swallowed by the big hippo. We live in a world of gossip. It’s been abuilding for some time before anyone noticed how strange it all is.According to Yuval Harari (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it started with the...

Audiobook… read by Kristen Sieh ……4 hours and 13minutes. If ‘NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS’….(book) …. I could understand. But that’s not the case. It’s a Man Booker Prize nominee. People are talkin. I quit reading this novel months ago. I chose the audiobook this time… finishing it. The voice-reader was the best part— she did an excellent job.But……..I hated this book with a capital H!!!I hated the righteous confidence of every sentence. It felt pretentious—silly—ridiculous—and very annoying! ….I...

My favourite tweet from the Poet Laureate of Twitter - her first of September - https://twitter.com/TriciaLockwood/st...I re-read this book (is it a re-read if the first time was an audio book?) following its deserved shortlisting for 2021 Women's Prize - now joined by a rare double shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. I have to say that on a second (or first) read I think the book was even better than the first timeOriginal review “Stream-of-consciousness…. Stream-of-consciousness was long...

I understand what this novel was trying to do and it is witty and at times genuinely moving. It does feel like two novels in one. The first is a novel about what it means to be Very Online and if you aren’t, I am not sure that it will make sense. The second is about a a family managing a terrible tragedy and how it magnified what really matters and does not matter. I really enjoyed this but I did wish the two novels felt more like one. Regardless, Lockwood is a phenomenal writer who is a keen ob...

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 *siiiigh*Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 This autofictional account of grief could be deeply moving, if it wasn't so disparate and full of gratuitous non-insights about digital communication. Split into two parts, we first meet a narrator who is obsessed with the internet, which is referred to as "the portal". The text presents lots of weird twitter stuff pushing the deeply conservative attitude that all digital communication is necessarily

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2021Shortlisted for the Women's prize 2021Well this was an underwhelming experience, and call me strange, but the first kaleidoscopic, high-on-sugar, kind of Tumblr feed present spoke much more to me than the second, real life part.If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?Part 1 of No One Is Talking About This is less a story than an endless now of a globetrotting influencer, vaguely disturbed by events in the real world. It

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.My overall verdictThe two sides of Twitter:The best bit:no one everyone is talking about this

Shortlisted for the Womens' Prize for Fiction, 2021.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2021. Ugh.(If I have to add anymore shortlists or god forbid, wins here, I will lose my mind.)The unnamed narrator in the first half of the book reminded me of the protagonist from the tv series fleabag. The quirky sense of humour and the sarcastic wit were very charming, but my admiration of the book ends here because the rest of it reeks of enlightened centrism. And I tried really hard to ignore it because al...

I'm well aware I'm going to be an outlier on this one, but I'm not deliberately trying to have a contrary take – it just didn't do anything much for me. Feels a few years out of date despite its supposed up-to-the-minuteness; I found the tryhard Weird Twitter humour unfunny and the emotional beats predictable.Review copy from Edelweiss.

I was a huge fan of Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy, a book I have recommended to many people. A couple of years ago, I heard her speak at an event in Dublin with Sally Rooney and thought she was hilarious. So I was eager to get stuck into her debut novel, especially when I heard that it addressed internet culture, a topic she clearly knows a lot about.The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the protagonist has achieved fame via a viral post that reads: "Can a dog be twins?". Sh...

Is it just me, or should e.v.e.r.y.o.n.e. be Talking About This? Preferably with 'a feeling of clicking completeness'. (Marvellous writing, this.)Of course, in my very specific case, it took three words, no more than three words: the blurb, summoning me, with this 'urgent, genre-defying book' – yes, please.Mind you, am I – me,myself,&I – on particularly close terms with the Eternal Scroll? Hardly. It took me that extra embarrassing second to realise that the 'portal' referred to the internet – t...

I thought this book was brilliant but as I was reading, I found myself a little dismayed at the way I've heard a lot of people talk about it. So much has been made of the fact that this is a book in "two halves"--the first is an irreverent stream-of-consciousness-style series of pithy observations that mimics the experience of scrolling through Twitter, and the second is much more serious, focusing on a family tragedy. The temptation to explain this division away by describing the first half as

no one is talking about this absolutely defied my expectations and made me sob.i'm less engaged in social media than most people my age, so i was worried that this book wouldn't resonate with me. but it did, because it's so fucking human. it's a social media novel, but it's also so much more.the first half of the book establishes our main character as a resident of "the portal" of the internet, or twitter, or whatever it is. lockwood perfectly captures the surreal and crushing feeling of existin...

i laughed, i cried. how often can you say that seriously?review to come / 4.5 at least maybe 5 probably 5----------------this book has been on my can't wait to read shelf for a year and yet i have let 3 separate library holds expire. let's try this again.----------------very funny title for a book people won't stop telling me to read..........

The obvious quip is that everyone is in fact talking about this. I first read this several months ago and recently re-read it again. The first half is clever and I’ll give Lockwood credit for being modern and interesting even if I didn’t like it. The second half is set up to pack an emotional punch, but it just fell flat for me. The autofiction and genre-bending make this worthy of the attention this is getting. I just personally didn’t enjoy it.

This is ... quite possibly ... the worst book I've ever read.It made literally no sense. There is no plot, no development, no rhyme or reason between each paragraph. It is bafflingly shit and I cannot for the life of me comprehend the high ratings when it makes no sense??? What the fuck is going on???

4.5What a phenomenal reading experience that challenged me and made me a better reader. I usually take a few days to think about the book before I write my review, but given the way this was written I know that I will be better served writing this now. There is very decidedly a Part 1 and a Part 2 of this book. (It's broken up this way so it's helpful.) Part 1 is very weird (but not in a bad way) until you get used to it and also kind of hilarious and sad. Both parts are written in the same styl...