📚 Finished reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

This book is set in a (slightly?) future America where everyone has become entirely obsessed with their phones, whilst around them the country has descended into dystopian economic collapse, authoritarian politics enacted via constant surveillance and militarised police patrolling the streets, political unrest and an increasingly warm climate. It’s short-form video all the way. No-one reads books. For most people, the only real hope of sustaining a decent lifestyle is to be popular on social media. In other words, it is an uncanny version, OK, perhaps a slight exaggeration of, today’s world.

Our protagonist Lenny is a well-off middle-aged guy who happens to work for a company that works with weird billionaires who want to live forever to artificially improve their health and lifespan with the goal of achieving immortality. Again, not very different to reality.

We read a mix of entries from Lenny’s diary alongside social media posts & DM from Eunice, a rather younger woman he falls in love with.

A very compelling, albeit mostly horrifying tale of pursuing love in a world only a bit worse than our own. Let’s call it a warning from the future, or perhaps tomorrow’s present.