Books I've Been Reading Part 4: Liar

I’m not really sure what I thought of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar.

I don’t mean in the obvious sense, where Larbalestier’s main character, Micah, takes the unreliable narrator trope to such extremes that you put the book down thinking “What the balls did I just read?!”—no, I liked that. I liked that there were many possible ways it really could have gone down.*

I’m just not sure any of the interpretations really worked for me as an awesome story. There’s one that almost does,** but that ending leaves too many blanks to fill in.

It was a good book. I just don’t think it was my kind of book.

Also, it's exceedingly difficult to talk generally about a book where everything, including what kind of book it IS, is a sort of Schroedinger's spoiler—depending on whether you believe it or not. I thought that was cool, but it doesn't make it easy to write about.


*Although my favorite comment from the spoiler discussion on Justine’s blog, which contained lots of people giving their theories on “what really happened,” was the one postmodernist who pointed out that none of it “really happened,” it was FICTION. Thanks, dude.

**The psychodrama one taken to extremes, where you don’t believe anything she’s told you and spend your whole time looking for slips and hints to the inside of her mind. I keep referring to it as the “Detective Goren Ending,” because it seems like something he’d wind up doing.

Batshit Appreciation Day

You know, before Twilight came out, I have to admit I never appreciated the sheer creativity with which the Harry Potter fandom’s batshit is imbued.

I mean, Twilight fans are batshit, but it’s a sort of vanilla batshit, the kind where you just insert yourself into the protagonist’s place and relive the story replete with fantasies of nice sparkly missionary position sex, or sit around insisting that your fandom is the BESTEST fandom.* If you’re really creative, you lust after the werewolf instead, but mostly the batshit is a matter of intensity.

There doesn’t seem to be nearly as much in the way of fans astrally married to the villainous sidekick vampire who sometimes manifests himself through the fan’s pet hamster to inform the fan that the original author is out to eat all their sweets and steal their paperclips. You just get varying levels of “MINE MINE CHARACTER ALL MINE” and “THIS IS THE ONLIEST BOOK.”**

Which strikes me as doubly funny since Twilight itself spirals from a self-insert Mary Sue self-indulgence to full-on psychodramatic crackfic.

I dunno, maybe there’s an Inverse Law of Crackiness, or maybe it’s just that Twilight appeals to a particular group of people without much interest in changing things up. Either way, though, I want to go back and salute the Potterfans. You guys still win, no question.


*I remain with the theory that many Twilight fans have an unnervingly narrow breadth of knowledge. cleolinda’s posse once suggested that Twilight fans, unlike other rabid fans, do not launch from their fandom into other fandoms, which explains their whole Stephen King fiasco.

**Although that can be pretty entertaining, I must admit.