For weeks now I've been experiencing a moment of intense joy in bed before going to sleep. But it's not what you think.

It all comes from judging a book by it's cover when I was on holiday in Ottawa. I was in a bookshop looking for some reading matter when my eye landed upon a brightly coloured drawing on the cover of The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde. I thought it looked like fun and I got it down off the shelf. The blurb on the back began "Easter in Reading. A bad time for eggs." Right then I knew it was going to be fantastic. Two days later when I finished it I knew I was right. I was also hooked and since then I've been in a Fforde ffrenzy.

Next up I read the first book in his original series of Thursday Next detective novels, The Eyre Affair. That was fantastic too! I hopped series back to the next Nursery Crime novel The Fourth Bear which I polished off in no time (not too short, not too long, just right!). Since then I've been tearing through the Thursday Next series: Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and I've just started Something Rotten.

The books are just so funny in a Douglas Adams kind of way. The plots are becoming increasingly complicated as our heroine Thursday, a literary detective from Swindon, starts by entering Jane Eyre and changing the plot and then gets further and further into the book world until she takes up residence inside a novel itself! It's full of puns and crazy gags and literary allusion. Talking about the latter with my friend Andy (to whom I'd recommended the Eyre Affair) I had to agree that that kind of humour always appears as slightly smug. But then I think that's a peculiarly British taken on anything vaguely intellectual or high-brow AND funny. I resolved to stop worrying about it and just love it. What I really love is the way Fforde will take the narrative in all sorts of complex directions just to set up some pun or great gag. Believe me that the following passage from The Well of Lost Plots makes perfect sense when read in context:

'Okay', said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange. 'let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim's Progress, which had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC's approval?'

Joy!