Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde

One's taste for Jasper Fforde's books is largely dictated by one's tolerance for forced puns. This one contains a succession of clearly doomed partners with names such as Cannon & Phodder, Dedmen & Walken, Lamb & Slaughter and so on. I quite enjoyed those, but the half-brother villains Jack Schitt and Schitt-Hawse are somewhat less witty. Make of it what you will.

I enjoyed the first Thursday Next novel enough to give number 2 a belated stab, and it suffers from the same strengths and weaknesses: some fantastic and amusing ideas at risk of getting lost in a bombardment of curates-egg jokes and incident. It is also horribly over-plotted, with a central strand about The End Of The World largely drowned out by the love story, social events and other trivia.

The literary allusions are fun, but I was irked by a running gag about the most boring classics ever. The Faerie Queen and Pilgrim's Progress perhaps, but Paradise Lost and Moby Dick? Gah!