The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde for our book discussion group at the library.  Fforde is a Welsh author who writes these funny satires of literary controversies and current events. Thursday Next is a Literatec agent in an England obsessed with literature, investigating crimes against literature.  Thursday is dispatched to investigate  the theft of the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens.   Why anyone would steal Chuzzlewit, no one knows. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre is stolen, all England is up in arms.  Then arch-villian Archeron Hades, who has stolen the manuscript, kidnaps Jane from the book.

Humorous and full of literary and cultural allusions, such as  it's a well-told story, and will make you laugh out loud.  Thursday's boss is called Braxton Hicks.  One of her co-workers is Victor Allusion. 

"Daffodils" (1804)
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).