The Thursday Next Series

Jasper Fforde

1.) The Eyre Affair
2.) Lost in a Good Book
3.) The Well of Lost Plots
4.) Something Rotten

An interesting mix of a series. I'm almost tempted to classify it as light reading: the prose is pacy, not difficult at all, completely readable. I can't however, because the universe the plot functions in is well, complex. For one thing, it is uberliterate: werewolves and vampires are a real problem, but so are militant Baconians who claim that their patriarch was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. It's a world in which there are over two million registered John Keats (they have biannual conventions). Time travel is a regular occurence, dodos are genetically rescued from extinction (and make good pets), and England is still engaged in the pointless Crimean War. Most importantly, a lucky few are able to jump into and out of fiction, which is an unbelievably complex world in itself, where the characters of works both really good and really shitty go about their daily existences (whenever the plot is directed away from them). Overflowing with enjoyable reference (Hamlet wonders why he's such a goddamn waffler, and struggles to choose between a white mocha or a latte at great verbosity), and in some ways impossible to describe, the books are still quick, easy reads, and its that combo of great intelligence and airiness that make these so much fun.

Special Topics In Calamity Physics

By Marisha Pessl.

Kind of a hard book to describe. In some ways, it reminds me alot of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, in that the author and protagonist are brimming with self-consciousness. But it's also foundationally a story about growing up, and the tragic tones that make their abode around the edge of the first two thirds of the novel forcefully conjure Holden Caufield (I know...). Lingering senses of foreboding twist themselves into an out and out mystery later in the book, and I don't want to give away anything more than that. A final note--key to the entire book is an engine of literary reference, and it's that newer twist to a genre that is still young itself that has everyone talking about this book. Read it.

The Brooklyn Follies

By Paul Auster.

If you read the New York Trilogy in Dr. Rawson's class last year, don't expect the same book. The Brooklyn Follies is a much more human book. It's situated around Nathan Glass, a divorced, aging, depressed, lung cancer survivor looking only for a place to die quitely--his pick is Brooklyn, which is of course not such a place at all. Fortunately for him, he's forced to deal with his own unquiet past in the form of his overweight, (perhaps) underachieving nephew Tom, an event that quickly and untidly deposits Nathan at the center of a minor family crisis. At times suprisingly affirmitive, and at others shakingly brooding (glimpses of City of Glass' Auster) this is a book about the extra-normality of place, the life that goes on there, and the redemptive force of it. It's very good.