Picnic Comma Lightning by Laurence Scott review – perceptions of reality in the age of Instagram
Laurence Scott's first book, The Four-Dimensional Human, zoomed straight on to the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) prize shortlist in 2015. In a crowded field of commentary on our lives with new technology, his first-hand reports on digital existence, narrated with blushes and allurements and a scholar's grasp of intellectual history, were not like anyone else's.
Picnic Comma Lightning brings us further meditations on what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world. Here again, Scott ponders his world with a mix of delighted avidity, candour and melancholy. But this second book goes deeper, ranges even wider, and takes many different forms in the mind. It is a philosophical meditation on perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from confession to anthropology to social analysis. It is also an elegy for two lost parents, who died in quick succession when the author was in his early 30s.
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