'one of the biggest defects of books'

I've got lots of detective hats, three. I put them on whenever I find out mysterious things are going on in the palace. And I start to investigate, stealthily. It's not like the research I do with Mazatzin, because I do that with books. Books don't have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. This is one of the biggest defects of books. Someone should invent a book that tells you what's happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That's why they don't exist. And that's why I have to go and investigate reality.

—Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole (2010, trans. Rosalind Harvey 2011)