I was fortunate to be stuck on an overly-long business trip last week - fortunate because I had enough time to read a great book and discover a fabulous author. His name is Jasper Fforde and the book I read was The Eyre Affair. Yes, Eyre as in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. There are also numerous references to Dickens, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton. Sounds like stuffy, snobby British literature, right? Thank God that this couldn't be farther from the truth. It was a fun, humorous, witty page-turner that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Set in an alternate reality heavily focused on literature, Baconites go door-to-door trying to convince people that Francis Bacon wrote all of Shakespeare's plays, people get stuck inside of poems, and forging verses of literature's greatest authors is punishable by law. Our heroine is Thursday Next, a literary detective who is called upon to investigate the kidnapping of characters from literature's greatest works and prevent their literary homicides. It's silly, imaginative, and quite charming.
So, of course, I have already finished the next Thursday Next novel titled Lost in a Good Book. It's full of the same humor and charm as the first novel and I loved it just as much. I think there are five Thursday Next novels written so far, in addition to another series he's seems to have started regarding crimes committed in fairy tales that need to be solved by Jack Spratt and his assistant, Mary Mary. I think the first novel in that series is The Big Over Easy about the murder of Humpty Dumpty. But as soon as I post this, I'm going to start on the third Thursday Next novel titled The Well of Lost Plots. I'm sure you'll see another posting on this very shortly.
So hurry to your nearest library or book store to pick up anything written by Jasper Fforde. I guarantee you will enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment