Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next series #2)

 Lost In A Good Book by Jasper Fforde

This was fun! It's the second in the Thursday Next series, the first of which (The Eyre Affair) I enjoyed so much that I doubted the second could be as good - but it was. 

It's difficult to catagorize this series with a genre - it's mystery,  it's fantasy/science fiction, it's humour, and it's my favourite genre-without-a-name: 'books about books'.  

Thursday Next is a female detective who solves literary crimes by physically  entering books from which characters have been kidnapped, artifacts stolen, or lines rewritten. The plot whips you  into and out of the books on the shelves of the most amazing library you could ever imagine, a library with a talking cat who guards the books - and has an attitude.

To give you a better idea of what it's like, I'm going to quote a longer than normal passage and hope I don't get into trouble with copyright people. If I'm asked to take it down, I'll of course do so. 

"'What on earth is a grammasite?' I asked, looking nervously about in case the strange-looking creature should return.

'A parasitic life-form that lives inside books and feeds on grammar,' explained Havisham. 'I'm no expert, but that one looked suspiciously like an adjectivore. Can you see the gunport it was feeding on?'

'Yes.'

'Describe it to me.'

I looked at the gunport and frowned. I had expected it to be old or or wooden or rotten or wet, but it wasn't. But then it wasn't sterile or blank or empty either - it was simply a gunport, nothing more nor less.

'The adjectivore feeds on the adjectives describing the noun,' explained Havisham, 'but it generally leaves the noun intact.'"

This conversation was held while Havisham and Thursday were inside Great Expectations trying to fix a plot hole. Miss Havisham, a character in the novel they're trying to fix, is also an agent for Jurisfiction, enforcing literary law   

And that should give you some idea how wacky the world of these books is. They are wildly imaginative and unlike anything I've read before. I'd like to dive right into the third one, but with only eight in the series I'll probably hoard them for a while. I want to make them last.