The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

For November, the first month of this book challenge and the fact that it is NaNoWriMo, I decided to read a few novels about literature and writing. I could not think of a better book to start with than Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.
I purchased this copy at Casablanca bookshop for $4.99. I was completely unfamiliar with the author, but I had read good reviews on goodreads, and noticed a few booktubers were talking it up, so I figured I would give it a try. Classic literature, plus time travel? This should be fun.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it takes place in an alternate 1985 and it follows a literary detective named Thursday Next. For some reason when I started this book, I assumed Thursday was male. But, it turns out, she's a pretty bad-ass lady-detective.
Thursday works for a special police force that has many different levels. The literary detectives are SpecOps-27. The lower the level, the more secretive they are. So secretive in fact, that most people do not even know what goes on in SpecOps branches below level 9.
Thursday is recruited for a lower SpecOps branch when it is discovered that one of her old college professors, Acheron Hades, has stolen Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript and is threatening to kidnap and kill Chuzzlewit, forever altering Dickens' beloved story. Hades clearly does not stop with Chuzzlewit. As the title suggests, he also interferes with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.  
There is also this odd element of time travel in the book. Thursday's father is constantly traveling through time and it wasn't quite clear to me whether he was choosing to do this, or whether he was trapped for some reason.
I loved how Fforde blurred the boundaries between fictional characters in classic literature and  his own "non-fictional" characters. Fforde's characters can travel into the novels, and sometimes become characters that end up in the story, as well as these characters traveling into the real, present day world.
The whole idea of having literary detectives seemed kind of neat to me, but actually reading about the detective aspects...weren't. I'm just not a big fan of detective fiction...not that I've read a lot of it. I think the quick witty literature references and things like Will-Speak machines (essentially little robots that spout-off lines of Shakespeare ) and book worms (wormy-grubbs that digest and condense stories by burping out apostrophes and "unnecessary" descriptions) made the book worth while.
Overall I gave this books three out of five stars. It was fun, I enjoyed it, but I don't think I will be compelled to re-read this book, or finish the series.

Your reader,
Deni

My Collection

I have amassed quite the collection of books, I will admit. I would like to say that this has happened over a long period of time, but it has not.   The used bookstore where I have worked for the past couple of years, closed in September.  It was a very sad time for all of us, and I still don't like to walk down that side of the street, looking into its empty store windows.  I did, however, come out of that job with quite a lot of books. In fact, I had to buy a large shelf from the store, in order to house all of the books I had purchased during the closing sale.

Now any sane person, after buying one hundred-plus books, would read a great chunk of them prior to purchasing any others. Not me... I have continued to buy books from other bookstores for the past month, to fill the void I felt from my store closing. I love the feel of bookstores, especially used. I love the look of them, the smell of them, and they always seem to be the perfect temperature. Shopping for books always puts me in a great mood, and I always leave with a new treasure; something I know will give me hours of enjoyment.

As i was walking home today with a new stack of used books in my arms, I realized I have a problem. A wonderful problem of having "too many books".  I realized that I now own more books that I have yet to read than ones that I have previously read! Does anyone else have this problem?
I decided to go on a book buying ban until I read all of my new books. ALL of them. I am also including my boyfriend's books that I have not read. I counted today and came up with these figures.

Novels & Short Story Collections: 363

Memoirs & Biographies: 38

I told you I really took advantage of that sale.

I would love to read these all in a year (yes, I realize that would be more than a book a day), but I know that this would not be possible, as I work full time, and like to do things other than read (rarely). I'm going to say that this collection of books will take me a year and a half to two years to complete. Some are quite short (Esio Trot by Roald Dahl), and some are quite long (War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy). At the end of this, I will be able to say that I have read every book that I own. I'm looking forward to that. 

This is going to take an incredible amount of determination and willpower on my behalf.  Wish me luck!

Your reader,

Deni