Flexing! I love flexing when I do it. When I stop loving it, I don't do it. Meanwhile, it felt luxurious to leave today at 4:00 instead of at 4:30, and today didn't even feel like Thursday yet but not only was it Thursday it was also the last day of the week.
Two 3.8 mile city rides.
A fun romp, but an editor could have pranced around with a pair of garden clippers and tidied up a bit. I stopped noting characters because I never did get that inkpen implanted in my right index finger; at least the invisible books come conveniently packaged in the epitaphs. Braxton Hicks, fr'instance, was just amusing, like Linsey Woolsey in Auntie Mame. So I stopped hoping all the characters' names Meant something. I don't know Martin Chuzzlewit from a hole in the ground, though Quaverley is a great name; I was waiting for the Brontë stuff.
At the first mention of Jane Eyre the denouement is obvious and tantalizes you with satisfaction--eventually. That's good. Fforde does a decent job of briefly summarizing novels and integrating the summarizing into the action so someone's explaining Jane Eyre to a heretic nonreader didn't make me want to gauge my eyes out too much. That was fine. What wasn't fun was the tone. I am not well-versed in either detective or speculative fiction; a reason is that the tone of the first person narrators in these books usually puts me off by page one.
I'm thinking of Dan Simmons's Song of Kali. I remember that the author attempted to undo his protagonist's sexism through his wife's t-shirt, which read "A Woman's Place Is in the House...and in the Senate." Ooo, bumper-sticker humor, wittily original and redemptive. Anyway, that protagonist had that Tone. So did that of To Say Nothing of the Dog. The Left Hand of Darkness didn't, but I never finished it anyway. I can't think of another first-person-narrated skiffy book that I've read. There might be one.
The Tone is common enough in detective fiction as well to be spoofed in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and in "Calvin and Hobbes" through Tracer Bullet, and since this book is both vaguely speculative and vaguely detectivey, the presence of that Tone nearly put me off. Especially with a protagonist named Thursday Next. But not quite.
It was fun anyway, if not nearly as clever as it thought.
Yeah. The Tone. Maybe The Eyre Affair toned down the Tone enough for me to bear, maybe it's all in my imagination, maybe I wanted to like it because ÜberBoss liked it, maybe I wanted to like it because some Usual Suspects like it.
Maybe I just dealt because I'm gearing up for a big sf onslaught. I just put a slew of skiffy fiction on hold at the 'brary. Columbine found it amusing that I consider some books necessary to my cultural grounding; I just find it pathetic that I'm much more likely to succeed at slogging through Cryptomicon than Paradise Lost.
I was actually going to buy Ender's Game recently. It was there. It was cheap. It was trade not pulp size. Then I looked at the typeface--that was pulp not trade. I am hopeful that a library might have some of the books I want--Snow Crash in addition to the two above--in hardcover, though it's a detraction from the genre at all that so much of it is printed in paperback alone and not in cloth, and of that paperback, pulp not trade.
PLT sent me a Vernor Vinge book once. Pulp, hundreds of pages. Shyeah. Egg offered to lend me How Green Was My Valley, which I was listening to, so I could see how to spell some of the names. I finally got rid of copies of Crime and Punishment etc., that I bought at the annual library book sale when I only knew about obligations but not taste or translations, because if I ever do read any Dostoyevsky, it'll be in a readable format, not in pulp. I don't like pulp.
I also requested Hyperion, on PLT's recommendation. The author's name rang a bell--the Song of Kali fellow Dan Simmons. Bah. I should stick to discussing Barbara Kingsolver with STL instead.