THE LIAR'S DICTIONARY

Nothing happened and nothing was resolved.

And for a book about words, it didn't use them to help the characters along.

This was disappointing. I love words, and learning new words, and abstract concepts of language. And so I did love some of the themes of this book – how words are at once futile and arbitrary shapes that someone somewhere decided would mean something and that words are also super powerful in that they can give abstractions a meaning and shared understanding.

However the narrative really doesn't make sense and the characters are flimsy at best. A book about words should have phenomenal writing, but this prose was just okay. Overall a very meh read, though I did learn some new words (and some fake ones).

I didn't actually get invested in this book until the last third of the book - prior to that, I'd pick it up, read a little, put it down, and then forget every single thing I had read the previous time I had read it. Unfortunately, there was way too little character development; the device of the alternating chapters didn't flow that well, and in the end, didn't pay off for me at all; the “twist” - if you can call it that - didn't feel authentic. Things happened, and then were of no consequence. (See also: the mountweazels, the explosion by the train station, the fake lisp.)

I didn't hate this book, as my rating suggest, but I definitely didn't like it at all. I hope I remember enough of it to talk about it in two weeks.