Meta…very meta (I think).

The highlight of this book for me was catching a reference to another book I read earlier this year, I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. If my memory serves, it was playing on the idea that even is someone dies physically, they still lives on in our minds.

The essence is captured well in this article from 2007;

Opinion | A Partnership of Minds (Published 2007)

The tie-in for Gabrielle Zevin’s story is - spoiler alert - for the young man, Max, who tragically dies near the end of the story. Another layer of the theme relies on the concept of “lives” as played by video game characters. In video games, characters get multiple lives and perhaps Zevin is arguing, by taking a note from I Am a Strange Loop, that this idea is not so far-fetched for the real world either.

Aside from points-to-make, the story caught just enough of my attention to plow through it. Towards the beginning of the year, if you inquired about my interest level in a video-game fiction book, it would have been low. Now, I’m gaining a slightly better understanding for that world as a whole.