the eyre affair

After the first ten pages of reading Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, I realized that I needed to SUSPEND. MY. DISBELIEF. Once I did that, this book was fantastic.

Although this book appears to be set in the 1980s, there are a lot of things that differ from reality. Time travel takes place, people (and characters) can travel in and out of novels, and dodo birds are household pets (they were revived from extinction through genetic cloning). It's quite fun. The protagonist of the novel is a Special Operations agent named Thursday Next. She is hunting for a master criminal and murderer named Acheron Hades.

This book is peppered with witty words and clever references to literature. The thing I enjoyed most about this book, though, is the discussion of Jane Eyre. In order to kill Hades, Next has to travel into the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, which results in Next changing the end of the story so that Rochester and Eyre can end up together (before Next made any changes, the novel finished with Eyre going to India with St. John Rivers).

If you like stories with cultural or literary references, you should pick this up. There are some really funny parts - I laughed out loud when I read about a a Neo-surrealist convention that was invaded by a mob of angry Renaissancists.

I know that Fforde has written a whole series of Thursday Next novels, but two people have told me that they other books not as fun as The Eyre Affair. Has anyone read any of this series? Would you recommend that I read any of the other books?