How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu)

This book scores high on the cool-meter, with lots of geek references and self-consciously meta structure. The protagonist is named Charles Yu, and he is a time-machine repairman, a kind of blue-collar bloke, who spends his time outside of the time line waiting for service calls in a closet-sized time machine, equipped with a low self-esteem AI system and accompanied by a nonexistent dog. He gets trapped in a time loop after shooting himself in the stomach, and in the loop he visits a hypothetical version of his mother and simultaneously reads and writes a book called How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe as he tries to find his disappeared father, who sort of invented the time travel technology. The story is just as off-kilter as this sounds, and while I admired its originality, I never really got into it.