The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I can't forget this gem of a book. What fun! What a suspension of reality! I am having such a good time reading the Eyre Affair. It is refreshing and fun, and challenges me to use my English degree. I'm not even finished yet, but I would recommend it! Here is a overview from Amazon.co.uk:

Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney

Fluff and Fantasy

My Summer Sister by Judy Bloom was an enjoyable read, but it left me wanting. It just wasn't satisfying for me. So I turned to another author. My goal this year is to read nothing but fluff and fantasy, so I started to read, Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan -- a book highly recommended by a colleague. Unfortunately, I couldn't handle the separation of Momah, the married woman who falls in love with Frank Lloyd Wright, and her children. Not enough fluff for me.

So I turned to The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler. Again, I enjoyed the book, but I didn't find the characters rich enough for me. I struggled to remember who was who and unlike other books filled with different characters, I could barely visualize anyone. It was an enjoyable read, though. And an added bonus: I got a lead on a number of different science fiction/ fantasy authors. Science fiction is in line with my goal of fluff and fantasy.

But back to JABC, here is a blurb from the publisher:
From the Publisher
In California''s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships. Dedicated Austenites [which I'm not] will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy. "This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears Fowler''s shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don''t have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. . . Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There's no better introduction."