Lost in a Good Book (2002)

I foolishly thought I had read the first book in the series. So I was a bit lost (no pun intended). This is one of those "must read in order series" to fully appreciate the book. But I did enjoy it. Fforde is very clever with word play, although I felt like some of the jokes went over my head, as he often playfully refers to UK expressions that I am not familiar with. (ie. Chalk and Cheese) ( )

Even more insane, and even better. ( )

It was a little more difficult to keep track of what was happening in this sequel to "The Eyre Affair." Thursday's time-jumping father along with a multitude of book-hopping combine together to make for quite the humorous but confusing muddle. ( )

Very enjoyable, more smoothly written than book #1. The plot is satisfying and amusing.

> "…Talking about any of the characters you met within Jane Eyre might cause some viewers to suffer Xplkqul-kiccasia." The condition was unknown before my jump into Eyre. It was so serious that the Medical Council were compelled to make up an especially unpronounceable word to describe it.

> "Fishy," said Bowden. "Very fishy. How could something like Cardenio turn up out of the blue?" "How fishy on the fishiness scale?" I asked him. "Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark." "A whale isn't a fish, Thursday." "A whale shark is—sort of." "All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish." "A crayfish isn't a fish," I told him. "A starfish, then." "Still not a fish." "A silverfish?" "Try again."

> What's the opposite of deja vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet?" "I don't know—avant verrais?" "That's it.

> He picked up a jam jar from one of the many worktops and passed it to me. It seemed the contents were half rice and half lentils. "I'm not hungry, thanks," I told him. "No, no. I call this device an entroposcope. Shake it for me." I shook the jam jar and the rice and lentils settled together in that sort of random clumping way that chance usually dictates. "So?" I asked. "Entirely usual," replied Mycroft. "Standard clumping, entropy levels normal. Shake it every now and then. You'll know when a decrease in entropy occurs as the rice and lentils will separate out into more ordered patterns—and that's the time to watch out for ludicrously unlikely coincidences."

> "Thursday, that's not possible!" "Anything is possible right now. We're in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement." "We're in a what?" "We're in a pseudoscientific technobabble." ( )

Starts slow, but the second half is fun and clever. ( )