pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

For those unfamiliar with Jasper Fforde, he writes unique fantasy or alternate-reality mystery novels that take place in a world of books. I read his The Big Over Easy years ago, about the pushing of Humpty Dumpty over the wall; this is my first (and the first) of his Thursday Next series, in which a character by that name (yes, Thursday) works as a Literary Detective. Here’s a tease from the early pages:

…no one was taking any chances since a deranged individual had broken into Chawton, threatening to destroy all Jane Austen’s letters unless his frankly dull and uneven Austen biography was published.

What I think is charming about this story is the world in which books, and art, matter as much as anything does. It’s great fun for those of us who love books, to imagine a world that shares our value system. Also, because cloning and genetic engineering has come so far in Thursday’s alternate world, she has a pet dodo bird named Pickwick, and that’s pretty cute, too.

Filed under: tuesday teasers | Tagged: fantasy, mystery |