SarahJanet's Books

Thursday Next Series

I am currently in the throes of the fourth Thursday Next series, the books that started with The Eyre Affair and was followed up by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten. I finally got around to reading The Eyre Affair in California, and upon my return I quickly hooked up with the subsequent three. They are quick reads, and they're really hard to describe, something that seems to be the case with a lot of the stuff I'm reading lately.

These books are set in an alternative universe in which literature reigns supreme, and authors are treated with the kind of reverance that movie stars get in our world. (A very entertaining scene involves a John Milton convention, at which everyone is named John Milton having changed their names in honour of the author.) The plot revolves around a Literature Detective named Thursday Next (all the names are silly like that), and the first book focuses on the recent discovery by Thursday's uncle of a way to get inside books.

I have enjoyed the books immensely, but I'm having a hard time categorizing them in my head. Some books I think of as relatively intelligent books, some are fluff, some are funny...everything tends to get assigned an area of my head in which to swim around. But these are a weird combination of fluff, fantasy, mystery, and literary, and it's hard to get a sense of how exactly they're intended. Probably as no-man's land, which is kind of how they feel to me.

I think, thus far, the third one was my favourite, because it (without giving too much away) was set almost entirely in book world, and the jokes and situations involving literary conventions and the writing process were very nerdily enjoyable. I think that's why I'm enjoying these books - you pretty much have to be a book nerd to like them, and I enjoy it when books are written specifically with book nerds in mind. (I think it's why I enjoyed the two books about book clubs that I read.) The first book was also very enjoyable, simply because a chunk of it was set in Wales in the small town where my dad grew up, which had become the capital of the People's Republic of Wales. (Hee.)

I should finish up Something Rotten in the next few days, and then I have to decide what to tackle next. The Kitchen God's Wife is the next book for my book club, and since I've been an incredibly crappy book club member of late, I'm going to make a major effort to get that read sooner rather than later. I think I better just abandon all hope on the Lions of Al-Rasan, because without the motivation of book club to read it, I'm not sure I'll ever get it read, and I have a ton of other books out from the library that I want to get reading.

I also need to go on a mass returning spree. The library books are taking over my bedroom again. Bad books. No cookie!

posted by SarahJanet @ 11:18 PM