Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books

I like this series. This isn't to say that I love it. But I like it enough to keep reading it. It's billed as Harry Potter for adults. There's a little of that, a kind of alternate possible world in which a lot of history happened differently and a lot of the ordinary laws of science don't work in quite the same way. There's a certain nonchalance about the weirdness that makes it much more fun.

On the other hand, there's this strange, insular literary-ness. One of the conceits of the book is that in this alternate England, literature is a matter of life and death, or at least of great political and economic import. The series is set in the 1980s, which makes it pre-internet, if the internet could even be envisioned in this alternate world. Indeed, one way of thinking about the importance that literature assumes in the story is to think of it as being the social analogue to the internet in our world. This is amusing except when it's not. Sometimes it's cool, but sometimes degenerates into pomo snobbery or worse, pomo derivativeness. I don't think someone would have all that much fun with The Eyre Affair if they hadn't read Jane Eyre. (I have, though, so it's hard to tell for sure.) Maybe they would. It's just--well--lots of in-jokes.

On the up side, there are some genuinely interesting characters and efforts at character development. The heroine, Thursday Next, achieves an appealingly androgynous toughness a lot of the time. She works for the special operations, literature division. This job--authenticating, detecting fraud and tampering, etc.--is more important than you might think in a world where books are much more important than they are in ours. Her ambivalence toward her past military service and her love life are both quite human and nicely drawn. Other characters are punning caricatures. Sometimes that's fun and sometimes annoying.

Lost in a Good Book introduces a further dimension (as if an alternate history and time-traveling shennanigans weren't enough--then again, maybe they weren't), in which fictional characters have their own literary police force, protecting the integrity of books from those who would interfere with it (rogue fictional characters, or real people who, like Thursday, have learned to cross the book-boundary but don't have her upright morals).

Again, in this sequel, some of the gimmicks were really funny (like the amusingly simple test for excess coincidence). Others fell somewhat flatter. These books are not the kind of page-turner that will keep you up reading all night, but they are interesting enough to pull out of your bag and read while standing up in a crowded train, or to keep you from getting bored in those in-between moments when there isn't enough time to do anything serious but too much time to just sit around. It's actually a pretty good balance, at least for me. I'll probably be reading the next one.