Lost in a Good Book

Jasper Fforde

I’ve been reading Jasper Fforde for the first time for The Manx Litfest Book Club. These books are completely out of the ordinary, so if they’re new to you too, just suspend belief and dive in.

I started with ‘The Eyre Affair’ which immerses you in Jasper Fforde’s fantastical and humorous Book World. It’s 1985, but not as we know it. Characters can travel in and out of books, and a literary detective named Thursday Next finds the ability to follow them.When Jane Eyre is kidnapped, only Thursday can save her. I liked Thursday -  a sassy heroine who takes on sinister villains, and a corrupt organisation.

But her every action has consequences, which continue in the next title in the series, ‘Lost in a Good Book’. This discloses more about Thursday Next’s personal life, and her marriage to the absent Landen Park-Laine. Thursday attempts to bring him back, and needs the help of man-hating Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

These books are a romp through the fantasic world of Thursday Next - full of clever puns, quasi situations and quirky characters.  I haven’t come across anything quite like this series, which manages to combine famous books with fantasy, humour and a detective story too.

BTW, I was fascinated to find out how Escher's famous picture of reptiles inspired  Thursday Next's car, and this real paint job. Here's a pic from our Escher pop-up book, and here's the car:

  
Visit Jasper Fforde online for everything you ever wanted to know about Book World, and his other books too.

Book of the Month

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

This month's read is a Pulitzer prize winning novel made into a film starring Kevin Spacey and Judy Dench. Don't judge the book by it's movie - it's a much better read. Comic and tragic life events have left the downtrodden character of Quoyle at the end of his rope, literally. Ties, knots and rope are a theme throughout the book, and Quoyle is named after the kind of knot designed to be walked over on a deck. Quoyle's life changes beyond recognition when he takes his daughters out to Newfoundland to start a new life there, with the help of his aunt.The pace of life is slow, and that's reflected in the book. Annie Proulx's writing style is unusual, but really draws you into the hearts of people living at the edges in this remote community.

One Day by David Nicholl

Image courtesy of Amazon

“This is me.’" He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose if you phone first”

David Nicholls, One Day

We chose a book about love for February, but one of our group summed up it up as "too much alcohol and not enough romance!" Dexter does alcohol to excess, and Emma has her feet too firmly on the ground to expect moonlight and roses. This isn't a traditional romance, and the story is told through events that happen to the couple on 15th July, every year, for 20 years.

We were passionately divided about this one. Some people loved it, and had even read it twice, or couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.
David Nicholls expertly captures a sense of time and place, and sums up the trends that came with the eighties / nineties / noughties. 'One Day' has become such a popular read, that it's almost a trend itself now.

It's a book that can make you feel frustrated with Dexter & Emma, but there's deadpan humour and sadness too. Some of the group gave the book 5 stars, and others just one star, so overall a 3.5 star read.


Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

This seemed an old-fashioned book to me, and Evelyn Waugh did pride himself on being ‘two hundred years behind the times’. ‘Scoop’ was written long before political correctness, and there’s a strong sense of Britannia ruling the waves. I wasn’t sure how much of this was satire, or Waugh himself.

Some things don’t change though – Newspaper magnates like Lord Copper still ring true, and recent phone tapping scandals show the desperate measures that some journalists still take to create news.

I liked the character of the innocent journalist William Boot, who was far more at home writing essays on badgers than acting as The Daily Beast’s war correspondent. The telegrams flying between a bemused Boot and his newspaper are really funny, as are Boot’s experiences courtesy of his massive amount of weird and wonderful luggage. The inspiration may have come from the famous Bill Deedes, who reported on the Second Italo-Abyssinian War with Evelyn Waugh. Apparently, Bill Deedes arrived in Addis Ababa, aged 22, with almost 600 pounds of luggage.

Although this was a clever and amusing book, I didn’t feel much warmth for it. I thought it was a great concept, but the style and writing did put me off in places. The Book Group thought it was a 3 - 3 and a half star read.

Pam

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Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt & May Witwit

This was recently serialised on Radio 4 and is about the close friendship via e-mail between Bee Rowlatt in England and May WitWit in Baghdad. May is a University lecturer who teaches Jane Austen and loves shoes, and Bee is a BBC reporter and mum of three. May's e-mails reveal the chilling reality of everyday life with her husband in a war zone. As the danger increases, Bee makes the life changing decision to intervene.

Available for loan from Onchan Library.

The Jane Austen Book Group by Karen Joy Fowler

‘In California’s Sacramento valley, six people meet once a month to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but all wounded in different ways, all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and, under the guiding eye of Jane Austen, some of them even fall in love…’

 This month’s book choice was quite a light-hearted read, greatly

enjoyed by some members but not so much by others. Those who were enthusiastic liked the style of writing, the humour, and the concept of having the characters choose ‘their own private Austen’ for each meeting, thus revealing something of their own personalities and private lives. Those who weren’t so keen found the characters un-involving, the plot slow and the precept unconvincing. We did all agree, however, that it was not a memorable novel, some members having read the book previously and not being able to recall much about it. We also agreed that reading the same author each month would NOT work for our book group!  Cath

Book of the Month - The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

At a café table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting...
Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez's meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfilment of the immigrant's dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.


Most of the Group found this to be an absorbing, well-written book which gave a perspective and insight about September 11^th and its repercussions in a subtle yet gripping way. Some members found the method of telling the story through a one way conversation very irritating, but others enjoyed this unusual form of narrative. The ambiguous ending also divided opinion. All agreed, however, that there was much to admire about this novel, bringing, as it did, the complex issues of Islamic fundamentalism and America’s ‘war on terror’ to the fore with great sympathy and balance in an easily readable and accessible way.