Kay's Bookshelf

I added this book to my TBR shelf a while ago, after reading and loving The Book Thief. When I started reading this, I had no expectations. I was of course happy to notice that the writing style was very similar to TBT, perhaps with shorter sentences and fewer metaphors, but the very style I enjoyed back then. However the topic was, as I expected, a lot less serious than Nazi occupation in Germany. A bunch of kids, one in particular, doing… something. Meh. But then, without noticing, I slipped into it. The seemingly simplistic writing has a way of inescapably drawing one in. I finished the whole book in just a few hours, and only then I realized I loved it, unexpectedly, even more than I did TBT.

Throughout the book, Ed has no idea why is he chosen, who has chosen him and for what purpose, and yet he never hesitates in doing what he knows he should. Albeit an ordinary guy, with no particular set of skills, his deeds do indeed make the world a better place, for others, and ultimately for himself. He starts to gain confidence, he meets new people, he begins to live. A testimony to the power of doing good.

The characters are, all, inherently flawed. They all have their issues, from Audrey whose childhood has left her afraid to love, to Marv, who’s always grumpy and such a skinflint he’d rather kiss a smelly dog than paying for a meal. They sometimes use strong language or have casual sex. They could be called losers without batting an eyelid. And yet, somewhere deep inside, they all have redeeming qualities. I ended up rooting for each, I ended up caring for each, and I took it to be yet another sign of how great this book actually is.

Two quotes I liked:

“How do people live like this?
How do they survive?
And maybe that’s why I’m here.
What if they can’t anymore?”

and another, containing just the sort of imagery I love discovering in Zusak’s books:

“She also sits down, like the girl. She’s got her nightie on again, torn, and she has her head in her hands. [...] At one point, she holds her hands out, forming a cup. It’s like she’s holding her heart there. It’s bleeding down her arms.”

Thoughts on the ending: The kind of powerful ending that leaves people either adoring the book or hating it to bits. For me it was the. Single. Best. Ending. Ever.
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What I liked most: First of all, the very idea the book is based on, of going around and change people’s lives for the better was bound to strike a chord within me (yup, I was a diehard fan of Quantum Leap :) ). This being said, my favorite parts were of course the most successful “messages” Ed “sends”, the ones where the recipients are touched the most. I so like reading about happy people.

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What I liked least: There’s nothing that I did not like. Sure, it needed a bit of disbelief suspension at first, when Ed poured so much effort into something seemingly random (a card arrived out of nowhere), but somehow it all made sense later on. What if Ed’s life was simply so meaningless that he jumped at the opportunity of giving it a little meaning, even if that meant chasing card-shaped windmills? Also, Ed seems to really love people, and being around them, and so, what might have started out as simple curiosity grew into a must-do after a while.

Recommend it to? Absolutely everyone. My favorite book in quite some time.

Written by the same author:
The Book Thief

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Prepare yourselves to be amazed. Mr. Fforde has created a very original world where everything is based on color. While I was somewhat aware of that, having read some reviews previous to reading the book, I was nevertheless very pleasantly surprised to discover the actual thing.

The world has changed after Something That Happened. Even the people have evolved (or rather devolved) into Homo coloribus, people who can see nothing at night and only a certain set of colors by day. According to colortocracy, the highest ranked people are the ones who can see the most colors, for example a Grey (someone with no color sight to speak of) is lower than a Red (someone who can mostly see red, and very little of the rest), who is lower than a Purple (someone who can see lots of red and blue).

The people’s very names are based on this system too, as anyone who can see color gets to pick an appropriate name (like Russet, or deMauve, or McMustard; my favorite name was Floyd Pinken), whereas the Greys have to contend with using their own address as a last name (G-23 or G-8). Even the diseases are treated by showing people certain colors: what we know as doctors are called swatchmen there, and their medicine cabinets have been replaced by swatches of colors. Making me a wee bit dreamy as you have to agree it would simplify seeing a doctor tremendously :)

One of the elements I love in Dystopian books (or other forms of SciFi) is when the author manages to make the reader as familiar with current technology as can be. Mr. Fforde’s ingeniousness has dealt with that very well in this book: the powers that be decide, periodically, to give up some pieces of technology that they deem useless, or subversive, or whatever. The chosen technologies are then Leapbacked, meaning the artifacts are destroyed and no one is allowed to make or use them ever again. The society thus goes backwards and backwards, ending up, at the time the book opens, at a level more or less equivalent, technology-wise, with the beginning of the 20th century. A bit worse actually, since the bicycles have been Leapbacked, the books too, and who knows what else.

The country (world?) is ruled by the Munsell, whose statues are in every village and whose rules are never broken. Everything is constant, from the number of people (carefully guarded) to the shortage of spoons. The rules are incredibly strict, regulating from what outfit can be worn in a certain occasion to the minimum number of meals per day. More on the rules:

“The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed: The banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules—and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not entirely obvious.”

Unsurprisingly, loopholery abounds, people in charge always finding ways to do what they want (usually by declaring some things as being something else; my favorite example is the “chicken is a vegetable” one but there were more).

And the spoons, let’s not forget the spoons. For some reason spoons are missing from the list of items allowed to be manufactured, so the number of spoons is always constant (or even decreasing if we think some may be destroyed, or lost, now and then). So

“Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one’s person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred—shockingly—with the handle of a fork.”

Interestingly enough, although no one can see full scale, color is very important to people. Everything is colored and recolored using pipes with liquid, very expensive colors (colors that can only be obtained from artefacts that have belonged to the Previous, the ones before). And yet, color is going away from the world: everything colored falls prey to the Saturation Dispersion Index (or simply put, is fading). I sort of see a similarity with oil here, as there’s a limited quantity of it, huge yet but still limited, in our world, as are artefacts in theirs, and I thought it a nice touch (and also couldn’t help feeling sorry for those condemned to live in a black and white world after all color is gone).

To speak about the characters a little too (can you see I was head over heels fascinated by the world building?), they too are interesting, most of all by the way they grow throughout the novel. Taking Eddie Russett, he starts out as a naive person, yet with a good heart and always ready to do the right thing. Jane on the other hand is the very opposite: she knows lots of hidden secrets about their seemingly ordered world, and is ready to do anything to reach her purposes (I think I even detected a touch of cruelty in her, given how she treats people who mention her nose). Yet Eddie loves her and gradually she started to grow on me too (not to mention I was so happy to find such an atypical heroine :) )

Thoughts on the ending: show spoiler

What I liked most:
The charm is, as always, in the details. For example I have been wondered for a bit why the people in the book use the word Beigemarket instead of black market. And then it hit me: black is not a color, so it would not exist in a color-ruled world :) (speaking of beige, for the people in the book it is the color equivalent to Hell — I imagine it is so because it is so complete and utterly boring, but I may be wrong).

Other such details I revelled in were (marked as spoilers in case you want to find them for yourself):
show spoiler

What I liked least: I have found nothing to complain about. :)

Recommend it to? Anyone who loves dystopias, anyone interested in quirky worlds. Anyone else should at least give it a try :) (I was bound to say that, I love Fforde in general and I found this book in particular charming).

See also:
Some of the colors featured in the book
Q & A with the author

Written by the same author:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

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Popularity: 6% [?]

I am somewhat of a fan of Kinsey Millhone’s. I really like her no-nonsense persona (I am more of a scaredy mouse type, and it was probably natural for me to be attracted to a type so much different than my own) and her courage in getting involved with all sort of people in all sort of situations. As usual, in this book we get to find out some more details about her, a few more bits of the puzzle that she is. Some of them amusing (such as the discovery that she’s, in her own words, “a bad-ass private eye who swoons in the same room with a needle“), some of them rather touching (more of her feelings regarding the loss of her parents at a tender age).

As for the other characters, we don’t get to know any of them that well, due to their paths crossing Kinsey only when needed, and that for a very short while. However, Kinsey is very observant and a good judge of character, so we do get to know at least some parts of what makes some of them tick. Taking for example Bailey’s mother, Oribelle, a former beauty but now ravaged by diabetes, heroically trying not to complain and yet complaining all day; Bailey’s father, the type used to ordering people around, now trying to get to grips with the fact that he has little more to live and his strength is seeping day by day; the reverend of the Baptist church, acting like a pious person when in fact he isn’t precisely that behind closed doors; and many more. Bailey himself is an interesting character, albeit somewhat mysterious (and very good at fending for himself when needed); overall, the reader ends up rooting for him (a good thing too, as it was kinda obvious he didn’t do it because… well, that’s how it is in this kind of books :P ).

There’s not much I can say about the plot, since the Alphabet books are more or less all similar in that department: Kinsey is on the case, Kinsey starts asking questions, Kinsey is getting closer to solving the case, Kinsey is (usually) threatened by the criminal, Kinsey (sometimes) gets hurt in the altercation, the case is nevertheless solved, the end. The charm is nevertheless in the details, and these, of course, are not to be disclosed so as not to spoil the story.

One of the things I find amusing with the books in these series is that, while the things in the first one happened in about the same year (1982 I think) the book was published, the distance between reality and fiction slowly increases. For example this one was released in 1985 but the things in it happen in 1983. That is of course easily explained by the fact that in real life the author releases about one book per year, whereas in Kinsey’s timeline only a few months pass between cases. I am however looking forward to the more recent books (with an even larger margin), to see whether cellphones or the Internet (or other such novelties) are going to make an impromptu appearance. :)

Speaking of the series, so far I enjoyed all the books, and I am impressed by the fact that so far the author never repeated herself (in terms of characters and their actions). However I did notice a pattern throughout: whenever Kinsey has to investigate something that happened years before, whoever did the deed (that cannot be pinned on him/her, else it would have been so all those years ago) gets nervous and starts killing more people. This I think is in order to satisfy the reader’s sense of justice: as the guilty part cannot be convicted, for various reasons, of the old deed, there are these new deeds so the said guilty part will be convicted nevertheless.

A favorite quote:

I thought about my papa. I was five when he left me . . . five when he went away. [...] When had it dawned on me that he was gone for good? When had it dawned on Ann that Royce was never going to come through? And what of Jean Timberlake? None of us had survived the wounds our fathers inflicted all those years ago. Did he love us? How would we ever know? He was gone and he’d never again be what he was to us in all his haunting perfection. If love is what injures us, how can we heal?

Thoughts on the ending: This was one of those books where everyone comes under suspicion at one time or another, making it impossible (at least for me) to guess who the killer was. To my delight chagrin, the one person who did it was the one person I didn’t suspect at all. Yay! :)

What I liked most: The idea of having it all happen in such a small (eighteen blocks) town. For some reason it made it all seem both more intimate and also more creepy (since everyone knows everyone it means that everyone has talked to and smiled at the killer plenty of times). The part regarding the “Family Crisis Squad” was also quite fun to imagine :)

On the kitchen counter, I could see a tuna casserole with crushed potato chips on top, a ground beef and noodle bake, and two Jell-O molds (one cherry with fruit cocktail, one lime with grated carrots), which Ann asked me to refrigerate. It had only been an hour and a half since [event]. I didn’t think gelatin set up that fast, but these Christian ladies probably knew tricks with ice cubes that would render salads and desserts in record time for just such occasions. I pictured a section in the ladies’ auxiliary church cookbook for Sudden Death Quick Snacks . . . using ingredients one could keep on the pantry shelf in the event of tragedy

What I liked least: I loved the book up until one of the last paragraphs, where there was something I didn’t quite understand. The real criminal was (of course) apprehended, but no proofs were found regarding Jean’s murder. So the police couldn’t actually prove that the said criminal was the one who killed Jean, yet Bailey was set free — why? How come, since no one has proven him not guilty of the said murder?

Recommend it to? Everyone who loves mysteries :)

This book is a sequel to:
A Is For Alibi
B Is For Burglar
C Is For Corpse
D Is For Deadbeat
E Is For Evidence

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Popularity: 10% [?]

There is a special magic in number three, isn’t it? Welcome to the third stop of the Wilkie Collins tour! It is the first tour on The Classics Circuit and it plans to follow Mr. Collins as he visits a few of the book blogs in the blogosphere, in hopes of making new acquaintances. Feel free to visit the previous stops (1, 2) and the full list of the stops planned for the future. And, of course, enjoy this one!

Ever since first opening the book I was amused at the shape it way written in: letters and descriptions of events by various characters, in order to record a certain story “in the interest of truth“. The very same way The Woman in White was written, and, as I liked that book, I readily prepared to like this one in turn. At first it started out a bit slowly, but once things got rolling I could hardly put it down.

Were I to name a most amusing narrator, I would certainly choose Miss Drusilla Clack, a single woman dedicated to her faith and her charitable causes, so much so that she became a caricature of such a character instead of a multifaceted human being. Among her quirks we should note the fact that she considered sympathy for the sick a very un-Christian reaction and takes pride in giving tracts to people because that’s her idea of doing them good. A funny scene involving her is when she tries to force Lady Verinder into salvation by hiding books on religious topics all around the Lady’s house (and then she goes home so convinced she did good that she feels like a young girl again).

Another narrator that I have liked was Mr. Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s house stewart. Despite his age (somewhere around seventy and eighty) he takes pride in doing his job well and he treats the people under him as kindly as they deserve. In the course of the book he has quite a few fits of the “detective fever”, as he calls it, but always in the company of someone better acquainted with the situation and more likely to make discoveries (it can be said that Betteredge would make a wonderful Watson while never being capable of being a Sherlock Holmes himself). Although I have mostly liked him he did have at times moments of feeling superior to other people (usually women), and then I usually got annoyed at him. But then I remembered his most interesting quirk (he believed the truth, the life and everything was to be found in the pages of Robinson Crusoe) and it made me smile again.

Here’s one of his “superior” quotes, just to form an idea:

“[...] it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women—if they can. When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn’t matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn’t their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it’s the fault of the fools who humour them.”

Ugh.

Looking back I realize I have only mentioned things I have found amusing in the book. Don’t expect this to be a funny volume though — on the contrary, it is a very serious one as the happiness of the members of a whole family is at stake. Not any members of any family, but a cast of characters that the reader grows to like and root for, and as such their happiness becomes important (or at least that’s what happened with me). The atmosphere of the book is also rather gloomy, what with everyone suspecting everyone else of theft, with even a few deaths and illnesses thrown into the bargain. It is not a happy reading in any way, but it’s definitely a captivating one.

Here is a quote from the book’s preface by the author, illustrating an interesting side of the book:

“In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”

The young girl in question is, of course, Miss Verinder. She is a complex character, young, pretty, gentle, kind hearted, but with an easily excited temper. A temper that made me actually dislike her at first (way too overexcited by everything around her for my taste), but as the story progresses her strong nature begins to shine through, and the book ended with her as my favorite character of them all. As far as her way of seeing things influences the narrative, it is obviously after a while that her decisions influence the book throughout, but I think the mystery would have been just as complete even without her acting in a certain way. But, of course, I agree that the author knows best so I will say no more.

Last but not least, T.S. Eliot called this book “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels“. It is hard to believe in this day and age, when detective novels are everywhere, that a little over a century ago the genre almost didn’t exist. And then Wilkie Collins appeared on the scene. While not entirely original (parts of it are inspired from real life), the book established the cornerstone of the genre, and some of its elements are still used to this day (large number of suspects, amateur detectives, the person who did it was the least likely of all, a local policeman who does a bad job at solving the case and more).

What I liked most: There is a certain scene where Rachel has a heated conversation with the guy she’s in love with. It’s my favorite scene and I liked Rachel at least twice as much afterwards.

What I liked least: I was less than enchanted by the “medical experiment” that helps solve part of the mystery. I found it quite hard to believe despite Ezra Jennings quoting from official (and I supposed real life) books. Sure, the author assures us in the preface that he had make sure this is what it would have happened, by consulting “not only [...] books, but [...] living authorities as well“. I do believe him of course, and yet that part of the narrative was decidedly the one I liked least.

Recommend it to? Anyone who likes classics and/or good mystery books.

See also
Audrey Niffeneger’s review of The Moonstone

Written by the same author:
Poor Miss Finch

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Popularity: 27% [?]

The book is an example of what I call “light SciFi”: everything happens in the future and the technology is very advanced — there are many things that are taken for granted by people living in that time (and our narrator, Douglas Hall, among them), and yet it isn’t hard for the reader to “get” what the new things are and what do they do. Usually the names are very descriptive (such as “simulectronics”, a combination of simulation and electronics, “staticstrip”, a strip of normal, non-moving sidewalk, as opposed to the “pedistrips” that moved along, carrying people at various speeds), and sometimes there are explanations in a few words (such as when the way laser intensity affects people is explained). Because of this I could easily get into the book and the world it depicted, despite its differences from my own world — and, predictably enough, I loved that.

The characters are very few and quite underdeveloped (and none of them except the narrator gets enough “screen time” for the reader to get to know them and/or get to care for them) — and yet this doesn’t make the book less interesting. Once, because of the plot and the mystery surrounding Hall, but also because of the questions it makes arise in the mind of the reader. For example, the professor was very attached to what he called “his little people”, and we also get some insight into the mind of one of the simulated characters (a special one, cursed with the knowledge that he was nothing but bits of information and electric impulses). It makes the reader wonder — what actually makes a person real? Can a simulated person be called a person? Does a simulated person have a soul? Are their feelings any less important because they don’t actually exist? And more such questions, because all the people in the simulated environment do not realize (with very few exceptions) that they are not real people, that their reality is not a reality. It is perhaps a perfect example to illustrate the relativity of everything and its dependence on the observer: a simulated person is real in the eyes of another resident of the same reality; and it’s just a simulation, no more serious than a plaything in Hall’s and his colleagues’ eyes.

A simile that I liked:

[...] she seemed like a fragile Dresden that might crumble beneath the feathery assault of moonlight.

As a last thought — the book was written in 1964; I wonder what would the author (dead in ‘76) think about The Sims (every bit the immaterial beings in the immaterial world that he has envisioned all these years ago; sure, they don’t have consciousness as of yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that time would also come).

What I liked most: A large part of the book consists of Hall’s ruminations as he tries to make sense of what is happening around him. I very much liked the fact that he was open to all possibilities, including the somewhat lesser plausible one, that is was his mind playing games with him and that he had just imagined Lynch and and all the rest. I am trying to decide whether I would have done the same in his stead — would I be certain I had seen something or would I trust the rest — but so far I have reached no conclusion. Nevertheless this detail added depth to the character (and interestingness to the book, because, after all, one couldn’t not ask himself now and then, what if it’s all in his head?)

What I liked least: I have yet to decide whether that’s a touch of genius on the part of the author or just sort of a slip (lately I tend towards the former): at one point Hall sees the daughter of the dead professor almost crying for her loss, and he wonders why, since in this day and age the technology has made it very easy for one to be certain that one person has really died so there’s no need for wakes and funerals. First of all, I don’t very much understand what is the connection (why should there be a connection) between mourning a loss and an actual funeral. I tried hard to understand what the author wanted to say by this paragraph and ended up with two possibilities: either he wanted to make crying for a lost father seem suspicious, and this was the best way he knew how (in which case, booo!!), or it was a very subtle hint at things to come show spoiler

Recommend it to? Anyone (but, of course, SciFi fans most of all). I am not particularly fond of SciFi but I have seen The Thirteenth Floor a while ago, and, as it’s inspired by this book, it made me curious about it too and I haven’t regretted it :)


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Popularity: 14% [?]

I was fascinated by the book from the very first page and the very first moment when the author started to describe life in the fiction world:

All the boring day-to-day mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally avoided. The car didn’t need refuelling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough hot water, and vacuum-cleaner bags came in only two sizes – upright and pull-along. There were other, more subtle differences, too. For instance, no one ever needed to repeat themselves in case you didn’t hear, no one shared the same name, talked at the same time or had a word annoyingly ‘on the tip of their tongue’. Best of all, the bad guy was always someone you knew of and – Chaucer aside – there wasn’t much farting. But there were some downsides. The relative absence of breakfast was the first and most notable difference to my daily timetable. Inside books, dinners are often written about and therefore feature frequently, as do lunches and afternoon tea; probably because they offer more opportunities to further the story. Breakfast wasn’t all that was missing. There was a peculiar lack of cinemas, wallpaper, toilets, colours, books, animals, underwear, smells, haircuts and, strangely enough, minor illnesses. If someone was ill in a book it was either terminal and dramatically unpleasant or a mild head cold – there wasn’t much in between.

Add to that the fact that the streets contained very few cars that appeared repeatedly and how some of the minor characters have names like “Unnamed Police Officer #1″ and “Unnamed Police Officer #2″, and you’ll get an idea of the world where the book’s action takes place. There is an affluence of generic characters (many of them transformed accidentally in Mrs. Danvers), contraband with plot devices is flourishing, the characters in Wuthering Heights are forced to take anger management classes, the nursery rhymes characters are perpetually threatening they’ll go on strike and so on.

I was very glad to see that my favorite three characters from the precedent books are also present in this one. Thursday (predictably enough, since she is the main character) is always solving other people’s problems, while at the same time struggling with a few troubles of her own. Miss Havisham, Thursday’s mentor, trying to break the world’s car speed record and protecting Heathcliff from the ProCaths (I’ll never look at Mr. Dickens’ Miss Havisham with the same eyes again :) ). Granny Next, unexpectedly arriving in Thursday’s book, and being by her side in her battle with Aornis’ aftereffects. It is perhaps interesting to note that, while the book can boast with no less than three strong female characters, there is no male counterpart to either of them. Not that it is a fault, of course, especially as strong female characters are hard to come by, I just was amused at the “out-of-ordinary-ness” of it :)

There are many things I have found absolutely charming in the book (Mathias, the Houyhnhnm that is a bit of a show-off and speaks in quotes, or the fact that there is a reference about a new Nursery Crimes series starting to take life in the Well — quite cool if we take into account the fact that the author’s next series, currently a trilogy, but unpublished when this book was released is perfectly described), yet by no means I think it’s perfect. I would say it has the same fault all Fforde books I read so far have: there are many characters and many subplots and many of them are incompletely explored or not at all in some cases (What was the deal with Big Martin? What did actually happen to Godot? and more). I do acknowledge this, and have even been bothered by it at one time or another, but on the whole I was so enchanted by the whole literary world that I ended up not caring about (most of) the details (not to mention I am fairly certain that some of them are going to appear in the next two books too).

An idea that sounded quite interesting:

Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,’ replied Snell as we walked along. ‘The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colours of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer – perhaps more.’

A quote from the author about the title:

The title of the book, incidentally, comes from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana and Marianne have to go to the Well of Lost Souls to find the Sacred Ark of the Covenant. (remember that scene with all those dried corpses?) For years I referred to the place where the kid’s missing socks went as The Well of Lost Socks, so the name came quite easily to a place where fiction actually grows upon the shelves; it works well as a pun, too: The spring from which all fiction rises.

What I liked most: The mispeling vyrus!! A virus that turned every word around it to being misspelled (see it’s own name). It destroyed everything in its path if left loose, by misspelling the defining words in names or descriptions (the table became a label, glass became grass and so on). It was quite funny to me to see the way everyone’s lines became badly spelled when exposed to the virus, but the nicest touch of all was in my opinion the fact that Uriah Heep was at first named Uriah Hope (prompting me to rack my brains trying to remember whether his name was Hope or Heep in the original book), and became Heep later on after he was exposed to the aforementioned virus.

Also, it very much amused me the way everyone was always waiting for Godot and the fact that the American spelling of some words (labor, valor, flavor, etc.) actually exists because at one time the reserves of U were running out so they (the people of BookWorld) had to think up a strategy to make them last longer.

What I liked least: This book begins with a rewriting of the last scene of the previous book, the scene where Thursday arrives in the book she’s to live in and the former occupant of her soon to be home shows her around. The lines are very much the same between the two versions, with one notable difference: the scene from book two mentioned a Captain Nemo and Nautilus; the scene in this book did not, and I was kinda upset because it had seemed quite promising when I first read it. Not to mention the omission is also quite useless, as we later get to discover that Captain Nemo did actually live nearby.

Also, at one time Thursday imagines the way her tombstone would look (THURSDAY NEXT 1950-1986). But shouldn’t it be 1949, since Thursday was 36 in 1985?

Minor details, I know, but somehow these two nagged me a bit more than the rest.

Recommend it to? Predictably enough, everyone who read and liked the previous two books. Actually, this is currently my favorite in the series, and I think it just might work as a stand-alone novel too, so I encourage anyone to give it a try :)

See also
The site of the author

This book is a sequel to:
The Eyre Affair
Lost In A Good Book

This book is followed by:
Something Rotten

Also written by the author:
Shades of Grey

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Popularity: 13% [?]

Character-wise, I found this book to be an improvement compared to the previous one. There are still some characters (the official, SO-something ones) that I sometimes mix up, but there are also a few strong ones I would recognize anywhere. To my surprise Landen Parke-Laine is one of them: I kinda disliked him in the first book (his being engaged with someone else didn’t help), but here he seems a perfect match for Thursday, sharing her sense of humor and caring for her. Actually, Thursday’s whole family is penned in more detail now, making it easier for me to care from them, starting with Thursday’s pet dodo, Pickwick, who turns out to be a girl when he lays an egg, and ending with her mother that, perhaps not surprisingly, has also been a SO-3 officer (higher in rank than Thursday) and still works for them now and then. The utmost revelation is Granny Next, Thursday’s grandmother, one hundred and eight years old and always on the lookout for the most boring piece of literature ever written, so she could rest in peace already (as she puts it, she “got mixed up with some oddness in my youth and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics“), but other than that a very sharp woman that always gives good advice. One of my favorite characters :)

The author stills seems to have had a lot of fun playing with the details of the book (although there are fewer interesting names): for example, the Jurisfiction members communicate to people in the real world via footnotes, using what they call a footnoterphone; uncle Mycroft’s sons are named Wilbur and Orville (like the Wright brothers); the SO-5 agents assigned to following Thursday around (that mysteriously die every now and then) are named Kannon and Phodder, Dedmen and Walking, and (the ones who actually make it ’til the end) Lamb & Slaughter; a very successful TV show of the time is “65 Walrus Street” (21 Jump Street anyone?); and many many more.

There are two parts of the book I have absolutely fell in love with. One is the part where Thursday finds herself in her memories, because it’s the only place where Landen exists now — my favorite part was where she remembers a day when the two of them (she and Landen) went out to tea and, as she couldn’t remember the people around them, everybody looked about the same, matching Thursday’s image of how a person visiting a tea shop should look. Actually, I loved all the memories where Thursday hasn’t paid attention to people or has forgotten them and because of this they look blurry, with undistinguishable features. It seemed to me quite a cool idea, albeit a slightly predictable one. I have also loved everything related to Thursday’s experiences with the Jurisfiction department, where she gets to know Miss Havisham and a lot more fictional characters, including Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (who Thursday is told used to appear in movies under the name of Buck Stallion). As in Jane Eyre, the characters in books are shown acting their parts whenever needed, and were free to do what they pleased between chapters — I was very much amused to discover many of them having a penchant for technology/anachronistic devices between chapters (not in the least Miss Havisham who became almost a different person in the close proximity of a powerful engine :) ).

The library where the fictional characters reside (their books actually) is the stuff dreams are made of. With 26 floors above ground and 26 floors below (27 according to certain rumors), all covered in shelves, it contains all the books ever written (reminding me of Heaven in What Dreams May Come), and a few more. The floors below ground contain what is called “The Well of the Lost Plots” (the name of the next book in the series, that I imagine takes place there), because there reside all the ideas that have never made it into a book. As every respectable library this too has a very capable librarian: the Cheshire Cat (or the Cat who used to be Cheshire but, since they moved the boundaries is now Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat). I have to admit I am quite curious to read the sequels and discover what happens next, both in the library and outside it).

NEXT DAY UPDATE: Here’s a quote taken from The Well of Lost Plots explaining the library a lot better:

Doesn’t this sound GREAT?

A quote that somewhat illustrates Mr. Fforde’s idea of changes to a timeline:

I regarded my father as a sort of time-travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his ‘historical and moral’ differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The downside of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been born. ‘Things,’ Dad used to say, ‘are a whole lot weirder than we can know.’

What I liked most: It is a tie between three elements/details/plot devices. In no particular order, the first one is the Kafka-like trial where Thursday is accused (and, of course, in a true Kafka manner, most of the time she has no idea of what she is actually accused of). The second is the part where Thursday’s father proposes her to take a vacation in a parallel world until her child is born, and that world is our very own (and I dearly regretted that Thursday didn’t accept the offer). And, last but not least, all the coincidences created by A. Hades were quite a nice touch too :)

What I liked least: Can I complain a tiny bit about how little was the present affected by major changes in the past? Not that I mind this one very much since the author explained that the timelines have a way of preserving themselves, but sometimes I did find it a bit difficult to believe that Thursday’s life was exactly the same with or without Landen (other than the place she lived in, of course). Count on me to complain about everything time-travel related that doesn’t change the future as I think it should :)

Recommend it to? Anyone who has read and liked the first book. While this one is my favorite of the two, I am not sure the atmosphere can be understood well enough without knowing the previous events.

This book is a sequel to:
The Eyre Affair

This book is followed by:
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

Also written by the author:
Shades of Grey

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Popularity: 13% [?]