Dear readers, The term “Sunday Scaries” usually refers to that pit in your stomach at the end of the weekend, when work looms just a few hours away. But recently the terror I feel on Sundays arrives earlier in the day: It comes when I get [cue horror music] my weekly screen time report. Turns out, I’m on my phone a lot. We all are. How could we not be? We talk to our friends, families and colleagues through our phones. We get the news through our phones. We find recipes, make reservations and order meals through our phones. We coordinate our schedules through our phones. We navigate the world with our phones. And when it’s time to relax and turn off our brains, we pick up phones to scroll, read, game or watch. You’re likely reading this on your phone right now. What’s all that screen time doing to us? These two novels, both published in America this year, unpack just that. —MJ “Hot Girls With Balls,” by Benedict NguyenFiction, 2025
Yes, this novel’s title and premise — it’s about two trans women who play men’s professional volleyball — are cheeky and provocative. But that’s a bit of a Trojan horse. While the book does tackle the politics of trans women in sports, it’s really a meditation on how our social media feeds seep into our psyches and alter our lives. The story follows Six and Green, who are lovers as well as competitors. Given their fame they inevitably live in the spotlight, but they contend with it in different ways. Six just wants to focus on the game. Green wants social media to advance their careers. Nguyen throws a lot at the wall with this debut novel — set in a slightly alternate world, it juggles sports, romance and social critique. But one of the accomplishments that makes it stand out is the nuance with which Nguyen sorts through the pitfalls and opportunities of life online. Six and Green know that social media dehumanizes them, but also that it helped them find community. They acknowledge that it distracts them from each other and from the game, but recognize too that their online popularity offers a level of job security. Their thoughtful consideration is contrasted by the deluge of social media comments that confront them daily, which Nguyen embeds in the story like a deranged and hypnotic prose poem. In the past few decades, social media has shifted. Instead of people who post, we now have “creators”; instead of accounts we have “platforms.” The sense of connection and play that used to suffuse social media has been replaced by a sense of work and duty. With humor and heart, “Hot Girls With Balls” explores what that change means. Read if you like: Netflix’s “Black Mirror”; “The Compound,” by Aisling Rawle; “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. “Perfection,” by Vincenzo LatronicoFiction, 2022 in Italian; 2025 in Sophie Hughes’s English translation
There is a sentiment that goes around online: I do not want to be perceived. The idea is that we want to live our lives quietly, without the scrutiny of those around us. If, like me, you cling to this philosophy, I have bad news: “Perfection” perceives us horrifyingly well. The novel follows a couple, Anna and Tom, both “creative professionals, a term even they found vague and jarring.” In layman’s terms: They work as web developers, graphic designers and brand strategists. When we meet them, Anna and Tom are living in Berlin, having absconded from their “dull, tedious” lives in another European city for a fresh start. But slowly, the glow of their new world starts to fade, and their routines in Berlin begin to feel rote in the same way that their former lives did. And as they look around, they realize that the digital engines that initially freed them may now be the very shackles that trap them. The book is not inherently about tech — it’s more a scathing portrait of millennial culture and a cunning send up of its promises — but as the novel shows, that culture is deeply online. As kids, Tom and Anna came of age with the internet, and “the internet came of age with them.” Now adults, they are busy buying into and constructing a mythology that “was the topic of countless lifestyle articles and documentaries, and circulated on the Facebook timelines and Instagram feeds of an entire generation.” But it’s all an illusion; “reality didn’t always live up to the pictures.” Reading “Perfection” is like browsing a lifestyle ad only to slowly realize that what’s on sale is not a dream but a nightmare. Tom and Anna thought that the internet would offer them a way to craft individual, idiosyncratic lives, but it had a homogenizing and flattening effect instead. Sometimes the best thing to do is just log off. Read if you like: Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker column “Infinite Scroll”; “The New Me,” by Halle Butler; Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
|
