Hello, all! Welcome back to The Book Report.

“Welcome back” carries extra meaning for me, as I’ve just returned from a long and well-earned vacation. For the purposes of The Book Report, two great things happened while I was gone.

The first is that I got a chance to use the nook I got for Christmas. After going through it quite a bit I give it two thumbs up! The only way this thing could be more useful would be if it was in full color (wasn’t given that one) and it actually was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The second is that the flight I was on afforded me a lot of time to read a book on my nook. Which means that I have something to write about today.

The book I read was Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, written by Jasper Fforde and published in 2010. I’ve posted about Fforde before; if you want, scour the archives for my review of The Eyre Affair (fyi, there is a new Thursday Next book coming out this year, so look for it). In The Eyre Affair (and the Thursday Next books following), Fforde proved to be a wonderfully zany world inventor, and he gets even more creative in Shades of Grey.

The novel is dystopian, meaning that its a society (often set in the future) that has collapsed or degraded into a repressive, controlled state, often claiming to be a new utopia. Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are all examples of dystopian novels.

Fforde sets Shades of Grey far into the future (there are clues as to just how far), centuries after Something That Happened, an event that nearly destroyed society but no one remembers or wrote down what it was. After Something That Happened, however, everything changed. People began to see only one color, but it was different for everyone. What color you saw (and how much of it) determined your status in the society that rebuilt. Purple was at the top and Greys, individuals unlucky enough to be born completely color-blind, became (essentially) serfs.

The society (called Chromatica) is governed by strict Rules, developed by the founder (and Christ-figure) Munsell. Eddie Russet is a Red, living more or less happily within the Rules and hoping the amount of Red he can see is enough to impress the rich Oxblood family so he can marry their daughter Constance. A prank involving a prefect, however, condemns him to the Outer Fringes of society to conduct a chair census: one of a set of useless tasks designed to impress a particular moral on the individual. In the fringe city of East Carmine, he meets a Grey named Jane, and everything changes.

I think that’s about enough plot for now. The book is incredibly entertaining, and Fforde paints (heh) a fascinating picture of a world defined almost entirely by color. If you are a fan of other dystopian novels, I think you’ll appreciate the generally more light-hearted tone Fforde sets in this novel. If you’ve read other Fforde novels you’ll know what I’m talking about. The novel really is quite good and I found myself ignoring sleep by the end so I could find out what happens next, which is always a good sign.

So give it a read, and then look forward to two more planned novels in the series, hopefully hitting shelves soon!

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids! It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for another Book Report from Uncle Akatzen.
Okay. I’m not really your uncle. I get that. Sorry. I won’t ever say that again.

So imagine, if you will, a world where books are more popular than television. Stop laughing, I’m serious. What would such a world look like? How would what is possible and impossible be different? Could we bring back, through genetic cloning, the dodo bird? Instead of going to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, people might go to, say, midnight productions of Richard III.
Jasper Fforde (no, the two ‘f’s are not a typing error) envisioned such a world with his Thursday Next detective novels, beginning with The Eyre Affair, published in 2001. In this world, Thursday isn’t just a day of the week, it is also the name of the main character.

Thursday is a Literatec (literature detective), assigned to point out forgeries of Milton, debunk claims that Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio has been found, and generally make sure that people are able to enjoy their books.
Her life takes an abrupt turn towards adventure when someone steals the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, and then a minor character disappears from its pages!
The resulting romp is what the New York Times reviewed as “A combination of fantasy, comedy, science fiction, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and even ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.

One thing I especially like about the book is that it works as a highbrow and lowbrow comedy at the same time. Literature fanatics will love the references and cameos that sneak in and out of these pages, and casual readers will enjoy the quirky, James Bond-like, alternative England of 1985. They may even be inspired to pick up one of the books referred to in the series to give it a read.
Satirical, yet also reverent towards its source material, The Eyre Affair is a book designed to deepen the pleasures of reading. It is also sponsored by Toast!

After reading The Eyre Affair, be sure to check out the other Thursday Next novels: Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, and First Among Sequels.
Any readers curious about Fforde’s other work will want to check out his Nursery Crime stories, beginning with Big Over Easy, a Dirk Gently-like detective novel about finding out who killed Humpty Dumpty.
Fforde also just released a new novel, Shades of Grey, about a society that where people can only see one color, and the caste system determined by which color you can see.

Well, that’s it for me this week. Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_