The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair (2001) (Hodder and Stoughton)
Jasper Fforde
Grade: A
Genre: the rag-bag of genres as described below
Source: own, World Book Night edition
Thursday Next: (1) The Eyre Affair, (2) Lost in a Good Book, (3) The Well of Lost Plots

The year is 1985, the Crimean War is still waging on, dodos are in fashion, the public have a fascination with all things literary, and characters from Great English works of literary fiction are in great peril …

Thursday Next is a Crimean War veteran and a member of Special Ops 27: Literary Detectives. Her speciality is Shakespeare and her idea of an exciting day at work would be apprehending a group of literary fraudsters. When a first-edition of Martin Chuzzlewit goes missing, Thursday is put on the case as she designed the security designed to protect the work in the first place. She’s on the trail of Acheron, her former English lecturer at Swindon and a man whose name her superiors don’t dare to even utter. It is said that he knows whenever his name is said, and that no bullet can stop him …

Books!

L-R: Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter, Waiting for Nick & Considering Kate by Nora Roberts, Key of Knowledge by Nora Roberts and Reflected in You by Sylvia Day 

I did some work as a Brand Ambassador for graduate-jobs.com back in October and got paid in Amazon money. It's not as good as real money, but when you have a book-buying, book-owning, book-reading addiction like I do, it's gold. It's taken me since October to decide which books I wanted. I had a list of about twelve but the annoying thing was that most were cheaper on Book Depository! There was no way that I was buying a more expensive version from Amazon, regardless of the fact that I had a voucher.

So they arrived Monday, of course, when no one was in, and so I picked them up today. I'm unbelievably excited to start, but I could say the same about the 60-odd books in my room that I have yet to crack open not to mention all the Galleys I've got waiting for me ...

Which book would you start first? Have you bought lots of new books recently?

Linkety Links

These few days, I haven't been doing much except sit in front of the TV and watch the Olympic coverage. An amazing four gold medals today as well as two silver and a bronze - such a shame that Victoria Pendleton didn't make the three golds she'd been hoping for to make her the most decorated female GB Olympian in history. Still, two golds and a silver is nothing to sniff at.

In other news, I've just re-found the excerpt from The Angel, book two in Tiffany Reisz's The Original Sinners series, due to be released in 24 September 2012. When I saw the link on Ms Reisz's website, I got so excited, thinking that this was new and I hadn't read it before. A quick glance shows me that I have (not that I remember this) and it's nothing that I haven't seen before. Still, I'm going to be re-reading it in a sec. Awesome stuff.

The books have arrived!

They're here! Don't they look beautiful? Granted, the covers aren't as pretty as some of the other books that have been chosen for WBN, but I think they look pretty awesome all lined up, ready to be given away. Really looking forward to Monday!

TED: Half a Million Secrets - Frank Warren

I love PostSecret. For those of you that don't know, PostSecret is a blog started by Frank Warren where people from all over the world send in their secrets on a postcard. Each Sunday, a new 'batch' of secrets are posted up and it has become my ritual to check PostSecret every Sunday morning and take some time to laugh and cry at the thoughts and feelings that people have found the courage to share with the world. Frank sums the project up pretty nicely in the first few minutes of his talk.

Birth of a Book

Have a look at this video - just awesome. I can't imagine how many hours it would take to print and bind a book like that. I'd love to have a go, just to try it; I think it would make me appreciate the process a whole lot more