Humiliation, Round Four: The Results
Posted 8 September 2008 in Books by Catriona
And the slightly belated results for this round of Humiliation are in. Finally, I am the most humiliated!
Catriona, Dune: 4 points
Tim, Little Women: 3 points
Leigh, The Wind in the Willows: 3 points
Nick, The Eyre Affair: 3 points
Wendy, Vanity Fair: 2 points
Matt, Gulliver’s Travels: 2 points
John, The Grapes of Wrath: 1 point (hardly humiliated at all, really)
I would like to take this opportunity, though, to point out that everyone who has any interest in books at all should read The Eyre Affair, because it’s awesome.
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Share your thoughts [5]
1
Wendy wrote at Sep 8, 09:08 am
congratulations to you!!
Can you tell more about The Eyre Affair?
2
John wrote at Sep 8, 09:30 am
“I would like to take this opportunity, though, to point out that everyone who has any interest in books at all should read The Eyre Affair, because it’s awesome.”
Agree. Much better than Grapes of Wrath, by all accounts.
3
Catriona wrote at Sep 8, 09:42 am
The Eyre Affair is the first of Jasper Fforde’s literary-detective novels: Thursday Next, who lives in an alternative 1986, is a Literary Detective, investigating such crimes as a rash of Samuel Johnson forgeries. Then a criminal mastermind steals the Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript, and all hell breaks loose.
I can’t describe it in much more detail without giving away plot points. But it’s hilarious and intensely book-geeky. Fforde draws heavily on John Sutherland’s puzzles in Victorian fiction (if you’ve read those: questions that arise in the great Victorian novels, all about sub-plots and characters that have disappeared as the novels are serialised). This first one (there are four further Thrusday Next mysteries, and the two Nursery Crimes novels, The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear) revolves largely around Jane Eyre.
They were marketed as silly books for clever people, which is a little condescending. I’d say they’re laugh-out-loud funny books, but it does help if you’ve read widely enough to pick up the jokes.
4
Leigh wrote at Sep 9, 09:15 am
Congratulations, you poor humiliated soul :) … im not that into detective novels so i will save that one for when i am admitted to the nursing home …. kidding :)
5
Catriona wrote at Sep 9, 09:49 am
It’s not that much like detective fiction, to be honest. Well, it is—and it isn’t. It’s generically complicated.