Here are a couple of the friends who kept me company:
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I came across a review of this book on Bibliofreak's blog about a month ago and I was intrigued. From the back cover: "Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense." Our guide through this world is a LiteraTec (literary detective, I assume) named Thursday Next. Thursday is a sympathetic and wildly entertaining protagonist who gets into all sorts of scrapes and misadventures. Now normally I'm not a huge fan of YA fiction or science fiction in general but as a huge literature nerd I fell in love with the idea of a world where EVERYBODY obsessed/freaked-out-over books the way that I tend to on a daily basis. What book-lover hasn't dreamed of stepping into the pages of their favorite novel and living alongside so characters they've read so many times?
My major problem with the book, however, was that there was just way too much going on! There were side-plots and secondary characters coming out of the woodwork and the resulting chaos was a bit distracting. Cutting down on some of the less-essential adventures might have made the story easier to follow, though it would have cut down on the fast-pace Fford is obviously going for. If Fforde was going to magically take my suggestions and do some paring down of the plot I would also suggest that he cut out the incredibly necessary/boring love-triangle aspect of the story... I hear Thursday's love-life gets more interesting in the sequels so maybe Fforde felt he had to throw some drama in there to get things started, but I by the end of the book I was actively cheering for the relationship to fall apart.
I enjoyed this book- it played around with some of my favorite reader fantasies. I would give my eye teeth to jump into this book and become a LiteraTec myself, cause it sounds like my absolute dream job! That being said, however, I probably will not read this book again or recommend that people run right out to buy it. If you have a rainy day and feel the need for some seriously escapist book-loving, by all means look this one up. It's quick, dirty, and entertaining :)
I give this book: 3 Stars
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I've been meaning to work my way through Coetzee's work for some time now- I have a 4 or 5 of his books stacked up in my office gathering dust and/or doing duty as paperweights and door stops. I'm not sure why I have such a hard time getting into Coetzee's novel. I've read and enjoyed several of his collections of essays and postmodern/political theorizing but his fiction leaves me absolutely cold. I read his Foe a week or so ago and found the experience a bit like having my teeth pulled. Once I finished the book I could think about it and acknowledge the fact that I gained something from the experience and that it was probably a necessary/beneficial thing to have undergone, but at no point was it pleasurable. In Foe, however, the dentist was unusual and occasionally had interesting and thought-provoking things to say as she poked and prodded away at me; the Disgrace dentist, however, was old and tottering and seemed to be telling stories that I'd already heard hundreds of times. The story is about an English professor who has an affair with a student, is caught, and is dismissed from his position and who seeks refuge on his daughter's rural homestead. Here the protagonist runs into issues of class, race and sexuality. In a normal novel these interactions with Others might force a selfish, sexist, racist, out-of-touch Ivory Tower type to face his own weaknesses and evolve as a human being. Not in this book! There is relatively no character development from start to finish, the protagonist remains as unpleasantly self-serving and offensive as ever. Coetzee even seems to go out of his way to underline the fact that his main character learns practically nothing over the course of the narrative. Perhaps there's a deeper meaning here that I'm just not getting... it did win the Booker Prize (a second for Coetzee) and received rave reviews. Perhaps my issue is that the book's perspective is sooo male. The female characters are well-rendered, diverse and interesting but we are pointedly forbidden from getting to know them at a deeper level. The story is about one man's understanding of himself and of his relationship to the world- the main character can't hear or understand the perspective of his daughter, his middle-aged neighbor, or his teen-aged student mistress, and as a result we as the audience don't get those insights either.
I found this book frustrating- it had an interesting plot, tight and vivid language and a couple interesting characters. I just think Coetzee picked the least interesting and the least dynamic of the characters to focus the narrative on!
I give this book 2 Stars
The Thursday Next series is one of my favorites but I agree that The Eyre Affair has a lot going on and is definitely not the strongest of the collection. I know what you mean by wishing you could be a LiteraTech! You should give the next book, Lost in a Good Book, a shot. I didn't really get into Fforde until I read that one.
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