For those of you who are ready to go on to our next book, this is it: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.
Christina has said: "I would try and explain what kind of book it is, but I'm afraid that I won't really do a very good job. It is the first in a series of 4 books and all I can say is that it has been called "Harry Potter for adults".
First person to respond gets to pick the next book (Christina and myself excepted). Happy holidays, everybody.
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4 comments:
I finished this book a week or two ago, but haven't posted anything because I'm still not sure what I think of it -- overall. It gets an A++ in the imaginiation department for sure. I especially loved how her father would drop in at crucial/intense moments to chat and to drop hilarious insinuations about how he was accidentally mucking up the space-time continuum (Captain Picard would have a cow!). So funny. And I enjoyed the idea of a world in which it was easy for people to fall into books and characters to fall into the real world. I loved the concept of being able to be a tourist or even a permanent resident in a book -- as long as you stayed out of the main narrative line and dressed the part. So many books I would have to go visit! (The closest I got to this sort of imaginative feat was in grade school when I was in love with the Oz books -- I really believed I was an amnesiac exile from the land of Oz, and that if I just spun my grandmother's funky ruby ring around on my finger and said the right words, I would be whisked away from the sweltering playground and back to my plush green palace in the Emerald City to cuddle with the glass cat and take a supersonic tour of Oz on the back of the walking, talking Sawhorse.)
And the evil character was great -- the idea of an artiste of evilness, who loves evil for its own sake and not for any utilitarian purposes it might have. He had some funny lines.
I had two main complaints about the book. One was how it portrayed characters in books as knowing that they were characters in books, destined to live the same story over and over again. One of the beautiful things about great characters is that they are so well drawn that you are able to make yourself believe that their destinies extend beyond both covers of the book -- they are real people. Having them know and acknowledge that they were fake was clever, but overall was annoying to me. It was done in fun, but I think it would have been more clever if he could have had characters fall into the real world, adamant that *they* were the real people and the "real" people were figments of someone's imagination. That would have been more satisfying for me -- to have the characters be able to talk about things and events beyond the bounds of the storyline of their particular book. Anyway, that's the 8-year-old Believer in me complaining :) My other main problem with the story was how the author kept dropping cutesy literary references as if he were congratulating the reader for not flunking out of freshman English. It was fun for the first few chapters and then it got old.
Overall, though, the world he created was really unique and I enjoyed the ride. Charming, clever, and strewn with Dickensian character names -- you can tell he was having fun writing it. (Speaking of the character names, it would be fun to read this book onto tape and get to say "Jack Schitt" over and over, don't you think?)
Sorry to ramble... if brevity is the soul of wit, I am supremely unfunny.
First off, can anyone define the terms “spartan” and “flash” (as used in this book, at least)? I’m assuming it’s some sort of British slang, and wouldn’t you know it? My cat just ate my British-slang-to-English-dictionary.
I had a hard time staying interested in this book and am having a difficult time figuring out WHY. I mean—-why not? It’s not like it was missing anything. It had dodos, for cryin’ out loud. There was also Spike, time-twisting, the Shakespeare snafu, Mycroft’s inventions, how the banana came to be, Richard III being performed like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It even had Japanese tourists touring literature. Theoretically, there should have been plenty in this book to keep me riveted. Like Marie said, an A++ in the imagination department.
All the same, I could put the book down, do something else, come back, and...not particularly care if I picked it up again. I was curiously uninvested. It made me wonder what it is, exactly, that makes me read, that makes me devour book after book like I was starving for words. So I keep picking at this book, poking it, trying to figure out what isn’t there. But I guess that says a lot about me and nothing about the book at all, and so, probably isn’t all that appropriate here. Sorry if I'm a wet blanket, but I couldn't get past what wasn't in the book.
I was glad the book ended the way it did (the whole Landen thing). It could have gone many different and unsatisfying directions, but it ended, as did Jane Eyre after Thursday tampered with it, well.
Okay. I have to start off by saying that I'm ashamed of myself. I, uh, kind of forgot about the book club a little bit....I'M SORRY!! But here I am to make amends! I thought it would only be appropriate for me to comment on the book that I chose, so here it is.
It was very interesting for me to read your comments. One of my good friends read it and had a similar reaction...loved the imagination, but had a lot of issues with other parts, such as the literary name-dropping. I agree, that does get a bit tedious after a while, but I mostly just ignored it. Perhaps I'm a bit of an idealist when I read fantasy books, because I allow myself to get caught up in the imagination and I tend not to let minor plot points or oddities disturb my reading experience. In the case of this book, I was quickly caught up in its strange parallel universe where society valued literature above movies and television. I found that so unique. I also loved the silliness with all the various divisions in the Special Operatives. And like Wynne, I loved the dodos! I remember when I was in grade school and we learned about dodos, I tried imagining what they looked like and it actually made me sad that they were extinct. I know, I was a strange kid...what can I say?
I wanted to respond to Marie's comment on the book characters (ie. the characters in Jane Eyre, etc.) knowing that they were characters in a book. I guess that I had my blinders on again and this didn't bother me. I too thought it was clever, but it didn't diminish the creativity of the original authors or make those characters any less real. I've read the following three books and Fforde delves even deeper into this fictional world. You get to know some of those characters very well and you learn that many of the "fictional" characters do have interests outside the realm of the book where they reside. For example, in one of the future books, Hamlet enters the real world with Thursday and decides to live there to experience what the outside world is like. He actually runs into a number of problems because he can't make people understand that he "is" Hamlet and not just an actor playing Hamlet. It's kinda funny, but I'm not sure if that was exactly what you meant.
Oh, and Wynne, I know there's not much danger of this to begin with, but you wouldn't want to go on with the following books in the series. You would be thoroughly dissatisfied by the turn of plot in the second book that carries through until the very end of the series. It would ruin your satisfaction with the way The Eyre Affair ended, concerning the whole "Landen" thing. Oh well!
I really like this book and its companions, but I really didn't know how it would do as a "Book Club Book". I don't know if either of you who commented or anyone else who read it felt that it provided a cultural experience or something more to discover, but I honestly couldn't think of a different book at the time. Ah well! Not all interesting or entertaining books are good enough fodder for book club discussions. I'll try harder next time! Thanks for the comments, though!
I think we should have a rule where you never have to apologize for a book that you recommended. Ever. I mean, for every book that we read, I'm sure there's going to be one person who hates it. Right? And I liked the idea that I get to read books I might never have picked out for myself--that's the great thing about a book club--expaning your horizons, right? So as a Book Club Book, I say the Eyre Affair was a success. I am just a weenie, and I didn't like it. Not sorry that I read it, however.
Hey, do you know what other book had dodos in it? Douglas Adams had a book--Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency--which I wouldn't recommend, but still, it had dodos...
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