The Month Of Books With Unreliable Narrators (Warning: Spoilers)

(warning: herein spoilers of a sort) I read and enjoyed Girl on A Train today I consumed the whole thing in 24 hours. Which is saying something since I'm usually reading four books at once so this means I set the others aside for a day.:)

Without intending it this last month has become the month of Books With Unreliable Narrators.

 

It began with a book club book selection called A Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes. I won't say a lot about how it has an unreliable narrator beyond that because I hate spoilers except to say it's one of those books which, when you finish it, you need to read again to fully understand it. Which can be cool or frustrating... and depends if you really want to read it again. 

 Meanwhile, another book club picked Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, which is famous/infamous for being the first detective novel with an unreliable narrator, which some hated, calling it a "trick" by this lady you may have heard of called Agatha Christie. 

Unfortunately I knew more about this and was waiting for this "trick" which made the book a bit less surprising but it was still a fun twist. That brings us to Girl On A Train complete with its favorable comparisons to Gone Girl. While I tried to avoid the hype I knew going in that there was going to be unreliable narrator. 

 Sometimes I wish I could read book in an age without the Internet so I wouldnt have ideas of what to expect. But I do. This doesn't mean I predicted all the plot twists, some were great surprises in fact, but it meant I knew I couldn't trust what I was reading which made reading it at times, well, frustrating knowing part of whatever you are reading will turn out to be true.

 All of the books were enjoyable but in addition to sharing the fact had unreliable narrators they also had something else in common, something I heard from those who just couldn't get into Gone Girl or A Girl On a Train, namely none of the main characters are appealing.

With the exception of Hercule Poirot in the Ackroyd book I can't say I really liked any of the main characters in any of these books. Of course this then can spark the debate about the appeal of anti-heros and while I've enjoyed some anti-hero books let's just say I see both sides of this debate but I think, for a while, I'll try some books with characters I can trust and like for a while.

Like, say, Lisabeth in the latest Girl Who book (The Girl in The Spiders Web)... wait, don't tell me, I haven't read that one yet. Happy reading, folks.