Soon I Will Be Invincible
I'm lazy, have the attention span of a gnat, and have no motivation to do anything but listen to grindcore and watch Youtube videos of other people playing video games, so I haven't read an actual book in... never mind. But I've taken to listening to the audiobook version of this while I try to sleep/wake up for work, and it's pretty entertaining.
It will surprise no one to know that this is a superhero novel. Like, straight up. It's deconstructionist in that it plays around with comic book tropes, but it also indulges in them too much to be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't already accept them and love them: the heroes are more realistic than you would find in Marvel or DC, but they also have ironically unironic names; villains have island base, mad scientist labs; allusions are made to time travel, mind control shenanigans, and intergalactic wars between advanced alien species, which for some unexplained reason have something to do with heroes from our world; etc, etc, etc.
It's completely and utterly ridiculous, but takes itself seriously, while still being escapist literature at its most escapist.
It's definitely loves
Watchmen, as it's a superhero tale of superheroes past their superheroing prime, but the villain is out to take over the world in as supervillainy a way as possibly, and the "hero" is "new to the game", and as such is still in awe of the whole thing, much like any comic book fan is supposed to be. Except that she's not as nearly as big of a dork. And the supervillain trades off first-person narrative chapters with the hero, so he's kind of the hero too.
I don't know if this book is actually mildly intelligent, or the author just thinks he's intelligent enough that his foolishly indulging in his comic book writer fantasies isn't dumb, but the book is still well-written enough that I kind of don't care. All I know is that I'm reading superhero prose that actually feels like prose and it makes me happy.