Currently reading:

Lost in a Good Book: I think that I am almost done with Lost in a Good Book, although because it's an omnibus edition, I can't be sure. Things seem to be heading towards a resolution. I expect to finish in an hour or so.

With respect to this series - I'm pretty sure that this is the last of the Thursday Next books that I'm going to read. While I like the idea behind the book, I feel like they are a little too aggressively high-concept for me and I find myself frustrated with them. I do plan to return the omnibus, but will keep it in the back of my mind in case I decide to read The Well of Lost Plots.

A Few Eggs and No Oranges: I didn't make a lot of progress with this one this week. I read September and October of 1940, which is right in the middle of the London Blitz.

Being in the middle of a pandemic where some Americans are throwing tantrums like spoiled children over having to wear masks into stores and other public places, this is fascinating reading. We would not survive the Blitz. "Conservatives" would be whingeing about "muh riiiiiigths" as they all got us killed by refusing to put up some damn curtains. 

Jane and Prudence: I decided that I needed a dose of Pym, so this is next up. I have the VMC edition in paperback and all I've read so far is the introduction by Jilly Cooper.

I do have a three day weekend coming up, so I'm definitely going to need to add at least one more book to the plans. I'm trying to settle on my next Christie reread. On my ATVL blog, I reposted a bunch of Heyer reviews for #Throwback Thursday, so I'm also considering diving into my Heyer digital collection and reading one of her regencies! I also have a digital copy of Tey's The Man in the Queue, which is in consideration.

I have four books on the go right now, although at least two of them are nearly finished.

Mrs. McGinty's Dead: This is another one that I started last weekend and then got sidetracked away from - it's the most recent book on my Christie comfort reread. It's one of Ariadne Oliver's most delightful appearances in print, and that makes it a fun reread. Poirot leaves London for this one, and makes an early appearance in the action. There are some other fun side-characters, including Mrs. Summerhayes, who is a bit of a hoot. I'm again quite a ways into this one, and it won't take long to finish.

Lost In A Good Book: I just started this one on my kindle - I have an omnibus edition checked out from my library, and I'll likely only read this one right now. I enjoyed the first Thursday Next book by Jasper Fforde, so when I saw the omnibus available on Overdrive, I decided to read book 2.

A Few Eggs and No Oranges: I bought this Persephone edition a few months ago and I've been making my way through it rather slowly. It's quite a long book at 590 pages, and I find that it works well to read a week or two, or maybe a month, at a time. As I'm not worried about speed-finishing this one, you'll likely see it on my Friday Reads for quite sometime. The book itself is the diary of Vere Hodgson, a Londoner who worked for a Notting Hill Gate charity during the war, and who survived the London Blitz. She is described as sparky and unflappable.

The Body in the Dumb River: I've been reading this one for too long at this point - I started it last weekend and then set it aside for some other books at about the 1/3 mark. It won't take long to finish, so it's first up for the weekend. It was originally published in 1961, and I am reading the British Library Crime Classics series reprint pictured. The cover is just as lovely in person.

That should take care of most, if not all of my weekend!

I didn't post about The Eyre Affair a couple of months ago when I listened to it, because I just didn't know what to say about it. I was hoping that a second book would help. I'm not sure it did.

Let's just start with the Publisher's Summary (because there's just no way I could do justice to this book):

The second installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England—from the author of Early Riser.

The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with New York Times bestselling author Jasper Fforde’s magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside the BookWorld. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes. And she gains just enough skill to get herself in a real mess entering the pages of Poe’s “The Raven.” What she really wants is to get Landen back. But this latest mission is not without further complications.

Along with jumping into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth. It’s another genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment for fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse.

There's simply too much going on. This is Douglas Adams (mostly the Dirk Gentley novels) meets Terry Pratchett meets Doctor Who meets . . . something else, but it's not just those elements -- it's those influences without restraint (not that any of those are known for their restraint). It's just too zany ,too strange, too unmoored from reality.

There's cloning to bring back extinct species, time travel, vampires, werewolves, interacting with fictional characters, rabid literary fans, characters walking into novels/other written materials to rewrite them, travel, or just to meet with someone else -- and that's just scratching the surface.

I realize that this is tantamount to complaining that there's too much of a good thing, and I recently talked about what a foolish complaint that is. But this is different, somehow. The sheer amount of ways that reality can be rewritten/rebooted/changed in this series is hard to contemplate, and seems like too easy for a writer to use to get out of whatever corner they paint themselves into. One of the best emotional moments of this book -- is ruined, simply ruined by time travel unmaking it just a few minutes later.

Emily Gray's narration is probably the saving grace of this audiobook -- I'm not sure I'd have rated this as high as I did without it. Her ability to sound sane when delivering this ridiculous text (I mean that as a compliment) makes it all seem plausible.

I enjoyed it -- but almost in spite of itself. I can't see me coming back for more. I do see why these books have a following -- sort of. But I've got to bail.

His arrogant and confident manner had given way to a lonely desperation, and as his eyes met mine I saw tears spring up and his lips tremble. It was, to a committed Schitt-hater like myself, a joyous spectacle.

Was für ein herrlich abstruses Buch! Ich dachte beim Lesen unweigerlich an Dirk Gently (in Form der Serie, nicht des Buchs) und dass man hieraus eine ebenso bunte und verrückte Serie machen könnte. Tolle Vorstellung :D

Ich bin mir nicht sicher, wie viele Witze ich verpasst habe, aber es sind genug übrig geblieben um giggelnd in den öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln zu sitzen und sich zu freuen. Dabei hatte ich aber nie den Eindruck, dass es erzwungene Komik war, die irgendwann ausgelutscht war. Der Plot an sich ist dabei noch nicht mal so spannend, oder vielleicht spielt er auch einfach nur eine untergeordnete Rolle (in meinem Kopf?), weil der Alltag an sich schon genug Spannung bereithält. Mir gefällt die Vorstellung dieser Parallelwelt, in der man in Büchern - im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes - ein und ausgehen kann.

Größte Begeisterung hier, die war nach dem ersten Buch der Serie nicht da :)

‘Bad boy!’ she added in a scolding tone. The Tasmanian tiger looked crestfallen, sat on its blanket by the Aga and stared down at its paws. ‘Rescue Thylacine,’ explained my mother. ‘Used to be a lab animal. He smoked forty a day until his escape. It’s costing me a fortune in nicotine patches. Isn’t it, DH-82?’

This is such a clever book and there ere are so many quotable passages, but the problem is that may favourite parts contain spoilers of either this book or of pretty much any classic work of literature worth reading. 

I really admire the level of detail and research that Fforde put into this book, but I didn't think it lived up to the enjoyment of the first book, The Eyre Affair, tho. Maybe the novelty of Thursday's world has worn off a bit already, maybe the incessant puns and jokes were just a bit too much.

However, Thursday is still one of the best protagonists out there - kickass and kind.

The only real problem I have with this book is that it was so obviously written with the idea to continue the story in book #3 and therefore doesn't even attempt to be a standalone story - which makes me feel somewhat cheated and tricked into having to get the next book to find out what happened to my favourite characters.

I NEED TO KNOW THAT THE EGG IS OK!

Seriously, not cool, Mr. Fforde. But I guess, now I know how Scott's or Dickens' readers must have felt when they had to wait for the next installments of their stories.

And, yeah, I obviously am still in denial that Harry Potter worked the same way - except that I wanted to read the other books for their own sake, not to find out what happened to one particular character.

Ugh.