"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."

Last night I inhaled The Eyre Affair. This is actually the second Jasper Fforde book I've read, the first being The Big Over Easy. I plodded through Big, barely able to read it in a timely manner. It's not that Big wasn't amusing, it just didn't capture my imagination. Not so with The Eyre Affair.

What a wonderful idea: an alternate universe where art and literature are the most prominent aspects of culture, where Baconians go door to door proselytizing on the authorship of Shakespeare's works, and where characters have names like Jack Schitt. There is a theater that has only performed Richard III for the past 15 years, and which casts its actors from the audience 30 minutes before the performance begins, possible only because of the audience's familiarity with the work.

Yes, the book was funny and it was entertaining, but I think what really attracted me was the idea of what it would be like to live in a world of bibliophiles. I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

Other books I read this weekend: