Belén Gopegui is a favorite among literary critics because her novels – while utterly devoid of any artistic merit – serve as a pretext to justify all kinds of really fun research.

Gopegui (a writer from Spain) creates novels that are political manifestos and not works of literature. Her writing is extremely pompous, the plots are mind-crushingly tedious, and the characters are like plastic figurines, boring and interchangeable.

But hey, it’s not all bad. Gopegui’s novel Quédate este día y esta noche conmigo is like a fictional rendering of Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism. It gives me the perfect excuse to write about this important topic while pretending to do literary analysis. I love literary analysis but it’s not my fault that there’s less literature in this novel than in a double cheeseburger at Red Robin.

Please do not read this writer because life is too short to suffer like I had to while plodding through her unreadable prose. Do, however, read Surveillance Capitalism and, better yet, come to my talk in Boston and read the article I will publish on its basis.

I hope I don’t read anything worse than this novel in 2020 because there’s a limit to how much suffering I can bear.