How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe
I've mentioned this before: I don't read books in order. I flip back and forth. Re-reading passages and looking to see how long is left in a chapter or a scene. How long before a certain character goes away or comes back. I almost always read the last page before I'm even a quarter of the way through the book. And then I check out the acknowledgments and supplemental materials. So I quickly discovered that the last page of this book just says [this page intentionally left blank].
It was a little weird, but this whole book is a little weird. There are flow charts and diagrams peppered throughout. I didn't think much of it.
A little more than halfway through the book, the main character starts reading the book while also writing it because of a crazy time paradox. Like I said, this book is weird. Anyway, he quickly gets tired of reading the book like a chump and jumps ahead to the end to see where his life ends up. But he knew he was going to do that, and he's not allowed to do that, so of course he left the last page blank.
This was the first time I ever felt like a book was scolding me. Gently, winking a bit, but still scolding me for being as impatient as it's main character. It was a deliciously meta experience in a deliciously meta book.
This story itself felt like Kurt Vonnegut by way of Jasper Fforde. It's high concept, and there are a lot of gaps that the reader has to fill in. This book throws the bizarre at you and expects you to keep up. But there's also an incredible story in here about fathers and the ways they disappoint us. There's a very human heart beating and breaking in the middle of this high-concept lark, and it keeps delivering surprisingly poignant lines. Charles Yu is definitely an author I'll be keeping an eye out for in the future.
It was a little weird, but this whole book is a little weird. There are flow charts and diagrams peppered throughout. I didn't think much of it.
A little more than halfway through the book, the main character starts reading the book while also writing it because of a crazy time paradox. Like I said, this book is weird. Anyway, he quickly gets tired of reading the book like a chump and jumps ahead to the end to see where his life ends up. But he knew he was going to do that, and he's not allowed to do that, so of course he left the last page blank.
This was the first time I ever felt like a book was scolding me. Gently, winking a bit, but still scolding me for being as impatient as it's main character. It was a deliciously meta experience in a deliciously meta book.
This story itself felt like Kurt Vonnegut by way of Jasper Fforde. It's high concept, and there are a lot of gaps that the reader has to fill in. This book throws the bizarre at you and expects you to keep up. But there's also an incredible story in here about fathers and the ways they disappoint us. There's a very human heart beating and breaking in the middle of this high-concept lark, and it keeps delivering surprisingly poignant lines. Charles Yu is definitely an author I'll be keeping an eye out for in the future.
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