Jasper Fforde’s novel Something Rotten is the fourth in his Thursday Next series. Famed Literary Detective and Head of Jurisfiction Thursday Next misses the real world and decides to leave fiction to see what she can do about uneradicating her husband, Landen Parke-Laine. Thursday learns in this installment that things are indeed much weirder than we can know.

While I have enjoyed the entire series, I found this book more confusing than the others. The various threads of the story don’t intertwine until the end, and by that time, I had forgotten enough of the details that I was still confused. Of course, I’m a slow reader, and it’s partly because of that fact that I had difficulty putting the ending together. A reader who finishes more quickly than I might fare better. Fforde is a book nerd’s writer. His allusions to literature and history and enjoyable and entertaining. I liked the book enough that I’ll continue to read more Fforde books, but I’m going to take a break from Fforde for a while and read something else.

My next book will be Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Of course, I’m still working on Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White on my iPhone. Because Francine Prose autographed my copy of this book, I don’t want to write in it, so I’ll post my reflections as I read here.