😂 I've said this before, because the trial scene in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is excellent for describing the whims of the crowd, but hot dog: Dostoevsky had social media *down pat* long before our current tech.

I first read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND as a teen, when the self-loathing protag best sings out to self-loathing youth, but I've always loved this chapter, and its description of how even educated humans will sometimes make a public spectacle of pain just to regain some agency over suffering.

😬 Alternately, though, I'm pretty sure that Dostoevsky would have been even more of a nightmare than the rest of us if he were online today, so I'm glad he had his era, and we have ours!

@MLClark

Yeah, and he would have had a bit of trouble with the character limit. 😂 It would have been an endless thread...

@LiseL

I'm also dead certain that many of the great novels would never have been written if those writers had had access to social media instead. 🙃

@MLClark @LiseL

I bought the top 10 NYT fiction one xmas as a gift and one of the books was written in what amounted to tweets … I think it was Lincoln in the Bardo. I thought that was a dumb move. 🤷‍♀️

@q00w2 @LiseL

George Saunders' 1st novel! Famed writer of short stories that often have atypical structures. It's 1/3 excerpts from old news reports (some fictionalized, some real), 1/3 stage play, 1/3 prose.

He wasn't part of the "twit-lit" scene, but I can definitely see how his experimental novel wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.

I'd known nothing of Lincoln's long bereavement for his son, though, so the whole "returning to the tomb to hold his body" bit was an affecting bit of history.

@MLClark @q00w2

I'm not familiar with it, but (just reading your next post...) it sounds great. I'm open to all the atypical structures you want to throw at me, as long as the thing is readable. The unreadable stuff is for a more patient reader. 😂 🤷