To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

To say nothing of the dog! This book kind of broke my brain, on account of it's about time travel and there is nothing simple about time travel and to make it worse Connie Willis invents a time travel science and when you actually try to explain time travel you are going to make brains explode.

But what I love about this book, and part of why I'm going to go find some more Connie Willis books and read them ASAP, is that the time travel totally breaks the brains of the people doing the time travelling. In multiple ways! First, they don't really understand it any better than I do, and second... oh, second.

"It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—"

And then the protagonist gets time travelled, but the point of it is that this whole soliloquy is part of the "maudlin sentimentality" that comes with time-lag, which encompasses many amusing (to the reader) symptoms and is a result of too much time travel. Willis writes these passages with obvious delight, and I can't help but love them.

The plot of the book is... simple... Ned Henry, our protagonist, is charged with finding this weird statue thing called the bishop's bird stump, which is apparently very ugly but which is required by a beast of a woman, Lady Schrapnell, to complete the rebuilding in 20... something... sometime in the mid-21st century... of a cathedral that burned down in 1940. Anyway, the vagaries of time travel mean that Henry and others can't get anywhere near the cathedral at the right time, and so they can't find this thing, but Lady Schrapnell is very persuasive and keeps sending Henry back in time until he gets totally time-lagged. The only cure is rest, which he can't get in the present time with Lady Schrapnell all a-crazy, and so he gets sent to the late 1800s instead to help return a cat that got mistakenly time-travelled when it should perhaps have been drowned. Then things start to get crazy.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book, which also features 1930s mystery novels, jumble sales, séances, crazy university professors, and many allusions to the book Three Men in a Boat which I must go read immediately, because it's got to be pretty awesome if it inspired this.

Recommendation: For those who enjoy being totally confused and bewildered.

Rating: 9/10
(TBR Challenge)

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (13 August)

-contented sigh- I love this book. You should, too. Go read it, now.

What? That's not enough information, you say? Well. Fine.

I first read this book three years ago while in New Zealand and had to tear myself away from the pages to go hang out with people in Auckland, which is one of my favorite places in the world, so... yeah. I'd been wanting to re-read it for awhile, but I worried it wouldn't hold up to a second reading, but then the movie was coming out and other people were reading it and I really wanted to read it again so I did! And it held up just fine.

This is a giant sappy love story about a girl called Clare who meets her future husband, Henry when she's six and he's thirty-six. But Henry doesn't meet Clare until he's twenty-eight and she is twenty. Right. Because Henry randomly travels through time, going to seemingly arbitrary wheres and whens. The story flows mostly chronologically through Clare's life, with brief jaunts elsewhen here and there, and describes Henry and Clare's meetings and courtship and attempts (successful and failed) to be a normal couple.

It's really sweet and made me cry a whole bunch at three in the morning while I was finishing it, even though I knew what was going to happen, even though everyone and his brother knows what's going to happen, which I think is a strong point of the novel. Or I'm just a big ol' sap. Or both. You never know.

Rating: 10/10
(Summer Lovin' Challenge)

See also:
The Soul of the Reviewer
book-a-rama

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde (5 January &mdash 6 January)

This came in for me yesterday at the library, and even though I was a few pages into another book, I couldn't help but read this instead. Love me some Thursday Next.

The events of this book pick up 14 years after those of the previous one. Thursday is now 52 and settled into her life as a wife and a mother of three. SpecOps has been officially disbanded, but Thursday's job as a carpet layer is really a cover for doing SpecOps work, which is really a cover for continuing her duties in Jurisfiction. In that last, she is stuck with two trainee Jurisfiction agents... Thursday1-4 from the first four books of the series as well as Thursday5 from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. Things, as they do, quickly go wonky and Thursday ends up having to save all of Time as well as herself from evildoers. No big deal.

As I said, I love me some Thursday Next, and this is no exception. It's a bit more heavy on the allegory this go-round (the government has a surplus of stupidity they have to use up and are thinking about getting into the stupidity credits game; there's a show called Samaritan Kidney Swap) which I think detracts a bit from the real story, which is Thursday kicking butt and taking names. Nonetheless, I am thoroughly looking forward to the next in the series, which will apparently be called One of Our Thursdays is Missing but is not the next book Fforde is releasing. Sigh. Off to find some Nursery Crime, I suppose...

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde (25 November — 28 November)

Something Rotten is the last of the first four books of the Thursday Next series... I figure that since Jasper took a few years off, I can take a break now, too. :)

This was definitely a great conclusion for the set... basically, a whole bunch of odd things that happened in the previous books were recalled and sometimes explained here, and, of course, even more odd things happened!

It's a hard book to summarize, though, because so much of what happens here is tied to things that happened in other books — a fictional character comes to power, Thursday's husband is reactualized (or is he?), Thursday's friend's wife is an assassin out to kill Thursday... yeah.

The new things in the story are a plot by the aforementioned fictional leader to convince England to hate Denmark, going so far as to claim that Volvos are both unsafe and Danish; Thursday's acquisition of the Swindon Mallets croquet team which needs to win the SuperHoop to take down the Goliath Corporation; and that Thursday needs to find a new Shakespeare to rewrite Hamlet after its characters wreak havoc on the piece.

Basically, if you've liked the previous books, read this one. But do not under any circumstances read this first.

Rating: 7.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2004)

The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde (22 November — 25 November)

The Well of Lost Plots is the third book in the wonderful Thursday Next series in which our hero, Thursday, vanquishes foes who seek to upend literature.

The previous book focused on time travelling; this one is mostly about book travelling. Thursday has entered the world of Jurisfiction, those in charge of policing the fiction shelves both published and in progress, and is at the same time taking a respite from the Goliath Corporation who are still out to get her. She and her pregnant tummy are hiding out in an unpublished book called Caversham Heights until Thursday can figure out how to get her husband back — if she can remember him.

Yeah, it's pretty much that confusing. Thursday is also out to solve the mystery of several dead and missing Jurisfiction agents and requite the love of two generic characters. I love it.

It wasn't quite up to the standard of the first two books — a little too much babying of the reader with unnecessary repetition, and also a few too many typos! — but it was definitely intriguing enough (along with those two books) to cause me to move the next book, Something Rotten up to my new current read. Then I'm going to have to take a break from all the alternate universe-ing, I think. :-D

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2003)

Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde (8 November)

This is the second in the Thursday Next series of awesomeness, and I must say this one is even better than the first.

After sending away a Goliath Corporation employee to live in a copy of The Raven, the company is understandably upset and asks Thursday to go back and get him out, please. She refuses, and Goliath goes back in time to kill off her new husband before he can become three years old. If Thursday will go get their employee, they'll bring back her husband. She's sold. Unfortunately, her uncle Mycroft has conveniently retired away with his Prose Portal and Thursday has to figure out how to get into the book herself and also figure out why a bunch of weird coincidences keep cropping up at inconvenient moments.

The book was great and mostly easy to understand in spite of all the weird time-travelling and odd coincidences. I really love how everything ties in with books, even when the books in question are ones I haven't read yet (but should! I'll get to it!). Definitely a must-read if you're into befuddling plots and funny talks with Great Expectations characters.

Rating: 8.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002)

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde (28 August − 1 September)

The premise behind this book is an alternate universe in which weird things happen regularly − time gets out of joint, extinct animals can be cloned, religious fighting is replaced by "Who was the real Shakespeare" fighting. As in this universe, the government has a lot of bureaus to control its constituents, among these SpecOps 27, the literary division.

Our protagonist, Thursday Next, is an operative in this group who gets lured into a big investigation by the fact that she's seen the bad guy involved, Acheron Hades − few others have because he doesn't resolve on film. He is out to make a name for himself by stealing an original manuscript to Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit as well as a machine called a Prose Portal invented by Thursday's uncle, Mycroft. With it he can enter original manuscripts, kill a character or two, and completely change every copy of whatever story he's gotten into.

Thursday works to rescue her uncle, restore a failed relationship, and save Jane Eyre from destruction, all while battling the forces of evil in Hades and government corruption.

I really liked this book. Fforde makes the alternate universe seem very real with little details (an ongoing Crimean War, Jehovah's Witness-like "Baconians") and writes entertaining characters. A couple of times, when time-travel and manuscript-revising were involved, I thought too hard about how things could actually work and lost the story a bit, but otherwise it was great. This is the first in a series of Thursday Next novels, and I will definitely be looking for the second the next time I hit the library.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2001)