#The Eyre Affair

[the-forest-library]

New Thursday Next Book Dropping June 3, 2025!

After over twelve years, fans of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series are getting a new book in the series…and it’s the last one. Dark Reading Matter is to be the eighth and final book in the delightful sci-fi series about Thursday Next, a literary detective. Not much is known about the book right now, except the publisher description mentions that the plot was teased in the last book.

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.

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[jacquelinesbookclub]

Currently Reading: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend. There is another 1985, where London's criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave's MR Big. Acheron Hades has been kidnapping certain characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing. Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage. But solving crimes against literature isn't easy when you also have to find time to halt the Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. Perhaps today just isn't going to be Thursday's day. Join her on a truly breathtaking adventure, and find out for yourself. Fiction will never be the same again...

[friendly-neighbourhood-librarian]

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

It's hard to describe this book but it was a lot of fun!

In an alternate universe that's a lot like ours but also a lot different, a literary detective named Thursday Next is on the case of an inexplicably super-powered mass murderer who is kidnapping fictional characters out of books. When he holds Jane Eyre hostage, Thursday sets out to rescue her and also possibly fix the ending of her story while she's at it.

Also includes:

Dodo birds

Time travel

Literal bookworms

Vampires and werewolves

Secret government agencies

Evil Mega Corporation

More time travel

Many other zany things I can't remember

Thursday Next series: The Eyre Affair | Lost in a Good Book | The Well of Lost Plots | Something Rotten | First Among Sequels | One of Our Thursdays is Missing | The Woman Who Died a Lot

More bookish books

[tiger-moran]

I just finished reading Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and it was fine (although I can't say the whole 'arguing over who owns Crimea' element is something that sits comfortably with me given recent events). I mean it's really confusing sometimes but I do like Thursday Next herself a lot in it and it was... fine, until the end and then it's just giving me bad feelings about the whole rest of the series.

She got married. To a character who I feel like I know pretty much nothing about and as far as I can see she has absolutely no chemistry with. And then people keep going on about her having kids with him. And I don't know about beyond that but it appears the sequel does relate heavily to her supposed love for this guy and having kids with him but this romance/marriage plotline just feels so shoehorned in/tacked on for no actual reason to me and I just Do Not Care about her romance/marriage/having babies, and this really has kind of spoilt the first book for me quite a lot. Also now I'm really kind of 'meh' about the idea of reading any more of the series.

So that was disappointing.

[bellasbookclub]

Reccer Spotlight: Jordan!

The Hollow Kingdom

The Eyre Affair

An Old-Fashioned Girl

The Scorpio Races

With literary, historical, and fantasy vibes, Jordan's recs are here to delight your inner Bella Swan. Full text available in their tab of the Bella’s Book Club Summer Reading ‘23 Reclist!

more info on BBC Summer Reading 2023

more Reccer Spotlights

[firstofficerrose]

So I'm reading The Eyre Affair, and nobody tell me if I'm right, but given a few of the clues here and the general haphazardness of the timeline in a world with ChronoGuards... I think it's entirely possible that Thursday's father is Sherlock Holmes. It's distinctly possible.

[primordialnoodlesoup]

Hehehe

[noah-luck-easterly]

A visit from a door-to-door Baconian; from Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair

[shititskat]

I am aromantic and as such should not be trusted on matters of romance

HOWEVER

I do know there is NOTHING more romantic than when you’re playing the piano and, without you noticing, they start playing in harmony beside you.

[jacquelinesbookclub]

The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

“Jasper Fforde has gone where no other fictioneer has gone before” claims The Guardian in the front cover endorsement. What a load of genetically re-engineered dodo crap. Who amongst us hasn’t day-dreamed about going into the books we love and meeting our favourite characters? That’s where it all starts for us “fictioneers”. The first stories we tell are clunky re-imaginings of the things that speak to us, we get enraptured by a story and it motivates us to share that story too. It’s a tale as old as human communication. Oral and written tradition is just this, sharing stories, and over time we add parts of ourselves to the narrative and mould it to better fit us. It’s how we learn to tell our own stories, by first copying the things we love. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness”, or so it has been said.

Lately I’ve been attempting to shift my time-use away from consumption and towards creation. I had found myself trapped endlessly scrolling social media, or watching stuff I don’t care about just to have something on the telly. I felt like I was wasting my time and getting nothing out of any of it. But the real kick in the arse was watching my kids emulate that same behaviour, and being unable to connect with them on any conversational level for the two days a week they live with me because they’d rather hide themselves away in a hole of Sonic memes from TikTok via Gacha Life via YouTube shorts. And how could I blame them? I was in my own hole of complaining about Formerly-Known-As-Twitter drama and voyeuristically watching old men build things with their hands (my guilty pleasure). None of us were engaged, and all of us were miserable. So I turned off the TV, deleted half the apps from my phone and YouTube from my Switch, and loaded up on art supplies from the dollar store, ready to set an example and give us all something to bond over. And it worked! (Mostly. As I’m writing this, my daughter is watching Spirit Rangers on Netflix and I’m listening to music with my headphones on. Lets just call it parallel play, alright?)

By the end of the first day without the addictive pull of easy dopamine machines, both of my kids had written multi-thousand word short stories. My daughter (10yo), who’s special interest is kid horror like Poppy Playtime and Five Nights at Freddy’s, wrote about a little girl with a traumatic past who solves puzzles and befriends the big scary monsters. My eldest (12yo) on the other hand is big into anime, their favourites right now being My Hero Academia and Tengoku Daimakyo. They wrote a character driven isekai turned reverse-isekai slice of life, naturally. Given the freedom to write whatever they wanted without guidelines from teachers, both of them re-told their own favourite stories with a personal flair. This is how we learn to tell stories, it’s how we learn anything really, through repetition. Just like how babies learn to speak by imitating the sounds its parents make until it learns meaning and context, in imitating the stories we love, we learn story structure, flow, framing, technique, effective use of dialogue and thematic meaning. It’s not the only way we learn, of course, we get taught the nuts and bolts of writing in school, and some take that all the way through university in order to perfect their craft, but I think that’s all polish. The people who study writing are the people who have a passion for the craft they’ve learned through personal experimentation, and it’s passion that is key for motivation.

In response to a recent live stream question about encouraging a creative design environment in the classroom, Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) said “New skill acquisition, for me, has always been based on desire.” Without the desire to emulate, without the love of a story or stories, our writing is dead before it’s even born. Writing is a slog sometimes, it doesn’t come easily to any but the luckiest few, so we need the love of the influence to fuel the work. I’m not just talking about the derivative copy cat stuff we all practice on, even the most original novels have influence. The reason we have genres of literature is because of the influence of authors who came beforehand. In 1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, in 1886 Robert Lewis Stevenson publishes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in 1896 H.G. Wells publishes The Island of Dr Moreau. We have science fiction as a genre because authors read science fiction stories and said “I want to write that too.”

The world Fforde has created in The Eyre Affair is one that those of us who were teased for being bookworms as children would long for. It’s a world in which people wear their love for their favourite stories proudly on their sleeves. Where literature is so important that the British Government have a Special Operations group dedicated to preventing book crimes. Imagine if people cared that much about literature in real life? Could you imagine people door-knocking and handing out pamphlets to argue their theories of who wrote Shakespeare? People changing their names and their dress to honour their love of poet John Milton? Imagine hundreds of people torch and pitchfork protesting over the possibility of Jane Eyre being changed. This all sounds hauntingly familiar, actually. There is one place in the real world where people have such strong opinions of their favourite stories: fanfiction.

Savage continues: “It’s frankly within pop-culture you’re often going to find a lot of intersection of desire for a thing.” Our modern internet is lousy with pop-culture, it’s incredible just how pop our culture has gotten. It drowns out any culture that isn’t pop by smothering it in mounds of double extra servings of pop. Our pop is so pop we had to create hyper-pop to contain it, another magnitude added to the pop-Richter scale, and boy oh boy, is there desire for it. I have many criticisms about fanfic, both the art and the culture, but I’m not going to go on a tirade here. What’s important is that people are doing it. They’re taking the stories they love and expanding upon them, putting their own spin on their favourite characters and creating something new and interesting out of it. As Savage says “I personally don’t care where somebody gets interested in creating something, I just want the act of creation to occur.”

The Eyre Affair is a love letter to the stories that compel Fforde, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Through the Magic Door made narrative. Published in 1907, Doyle’s collection of essays is adamant that popular fiction is vital to creativity, so this isn’t new age thinking. What is new is that we have more accessible places to share with each other, to create community around the things we love, and yet it still feels so closed off. When we say fanfic we think of a subsection of the internet filled with wierdos, from Trekkies and X-philes in the 90’s, to whatever is popular in fanfic today, I don’t know, what are you into? Is it Gideon the Ninth? Y’all still doing One Direction? Whatever the case, it’s delegated to a shadowy basement corner filing cabinet and forgotten by the rest of the literary world, and that’s a shame, because it is often where our most base fantasies as readers play out.

“Gone where no other fictioneer has gone before”? Fforde goes where all of us go, that’s what makes this book so compelling, only he does it in public where everyone can see.

[janeykath318]

The Eyre Affair is so wacky and delightful! I really love the pointed British sense of humor.

[bellasbookclub]

Reccer Spotlight: Ioco!

Good Omens

The Eyre Affair

Dogsbody

Eleanor and Park

And I Darken

Ioco's recs are all different types of throwback: we've got history, time travel, modern classics, and coming-of-age. Full text available in their tab of the Bella’s Book Club Summer Reading ‘23 Reclist!

more info on BBC Summer Reading 2023

more Reccer Spotlights

[nightlightpoets]

hi, welcome, this is mostly just a space for us to post the shittier disability and mentally ill stuff we can't put on our main for various reasons

feel free to send vents, rants, and stories by the question box

as jasper fforde said in the eyre affair: poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.

this is the space for all of our crack cocaine of the literary (tumblr) world.. and creepy, unnerving and uncomfortable imagery like liminal spaces

[herothehardway]

Mr. Rochester king of gaslight gatekeep girlboss

[cowherderess]

I wasn't officially tagged but I'm sharing my top 9 books anyway because why not. Really I am a patchwork of so many hundreds of books that I've read over the years, and it's hard to choose just nine. So none of these rankings are definitive– except A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, my #1 most-beloved of all time <3

If anyone else wants to do it, please do! I'd love to see your lists!