Books I've Been Reading Part 4: Liar
Feb. 19th, 2010 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyI’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.
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.
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Date: 2010-02-21 05:34 am (UTC)Argh, it's like one of those trick puzzles. I keep turning it over and over in my mind and I can't make the pieces fit! Maybe not exactly my kind of book, either. I might like worrying at things, but I like the part where I've figured it out, too.