Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Blurb from Goodreads

As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats–from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness–begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: “Something has gone wrong,” and “How soon can you get here?” As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

Why I Want To Read It

And just like that, it is Monday again! Happy first Monday of August! For accountants like me, it is a busy and tedious day because of month-end closing activities. Nevertheless, I am looking at the bright side of things; I hope you all do too. I hope you are having a great start to the week and to the month. I still can’t believe that we only have five months more before a new year will unravel. Over here in the Philippines, the threat of the Delta variant is becoming increasingly palpable as for the fourth consecutive day, we have logged over 8,000 cases. Metro Manila is also gearing up for the imposition of the strictest lockdown protocols. I hope and pray that this will all end soon.

To open up this week, I am posting a new Goodreads Monday update. Last month, I had a wonderful time immersing in the works of Japanese literature. For this month, I have decided to pick works published this year. This is also to catch up with some of my reading lists. As such, I am featuring recently published books that have made it to my reading list, starting with Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. Quite literally, I can’t quiet remember the blurb around the book (if there was) when I was preparing my 2021 Top Books I Look Forward To list. Or perhaps I did encounter the book but passed over it because it didn’t stimulate my curiosity.

Pass forward seven months later. I have previously never encountered Patricia Lockwood nor encounter any of her works. And then No One Is Talking About This made huge splashes. I kept encountering glowing accounts of the book but I guess it still wasn’t enough to pique my interest. A couple of months after the book’s publication (February 2021), it was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Now it is starting to catch my attention. What does this book hold? It did sound nonfiction to me (at least at the start) and was one of the reasons why I was apprehensive about it. Recently, the Booker Prize announced its 2021 longlist. And surprise, No One Is Talking About This made the cut. I don’t need further convincing.

To be honest, it was only today that I have read the books’ blurb. Reading it, my interest was further piqued, especially with the mention of “genre-defying”. I have often enjoyed genre-defying works like that of David Mitchell. The book got more interesting for it explores the current obsession with social media. It does seem to highlight several seminal and timely subjects as well. My copy of the book just got delivered today and I am hoping to delve into it later this month. Oh, it just got to me. The book’s concept does somehow remind me of former US Vice President Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

How about you fellow reader? What recent novel do you have in your reading list? What made you add it to your list? I hope you could share your answers in the comment box. For now, have a happy Monday!

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