The year in books #5: The Eyre Affair

Hot on the heels of Team of Rivals, I devoured The Eyre Affair, the first published novel of Jasper Fforde, whose Shades of Grey I read in January.

While I have to say that I found Shades of Grey a more interesting tale, that's no disparagement of The Eyre Affair; the later novel sets a high bar. For a first novel, The Eyre Affair is startlingly original and often laugh-out-loud funny. It follows English Special Operations officer Thursday Next, citizen of an alternate-universe 1985 England in which cloning has made dodos popular pets and the Crimean War has lasted over a hundred years.

Like Shades of Grey, the experience of this novel would be greatly damaged by relating too many details of its plot, but it is a delightful mix of noir mystery, Orwellian dystopianism, surrealist nonsense reminiscent of Douglas Adams or Lewis Carroll, and a chick-lit romantic sensibility that surprisingly fits perfectly into the story.

I don't think anyone would accuse Jasper Fforde of attempting to write highbrow literature, but if you're up for a fun, fast-paced romp in an original and intriguing world, The Eyre Affair is definitely worth a look.

As a side note, I realize I've given positive reviews to all five books I've read so far. This might give the impression that I just like everything. If you're looking for proof that this is not the case, ask me my opinion of Dan Brown some time. However, everyone I know knows that I love books, and my friends (and especially my mom) have good taste in literature, so I get piles of very good recommendations. That, combined with the fact that I rarely read more than the first twenty pages of a book I'm not enjoying, means I really do manage to avoid reading many books that I don't like. Also, the whole point of doing the 50 Book Challenge is to recommend good books to my friends, so the one book I've read so far this year that I didn't think was great I simply didn't include in the list.