42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

Several months ago, three separate friends recommended the first book in this series: The Eyre Affair.
It’s a hysterical mix of an alternate future, detective work and literature.
Many of the characters, for instance, have funny names. Like Thursday Next, the heroine of the novel. Or Jack Schitt, a nemesis at Goliath Corporation. Or Acheron Hades, the ultimate evil genius.
Thursday is a member of Spec Ops, like an elite police or military force responsible for policing anything from entertainment to agriculture, genetic manipulation, time travel and literature.

She works in a relatively low-profile division, in literature, helping retrieve stolen famous manuscripts and identifying fake ones.
Her father doesn’t exist. He was/is/will be a member of the Chrono Guard, which oversees the purity of history. But because he didn’t like the direction it was going, he went rogue and was eradicated. How Thursday and her brothers still exist is best not dwelled on. Paradox can make your head hurt.
Thursday’s uncle, Mycroft, is an inventor, and an invention of his turns bookworms into creatures that actually devour and digest words. When they get indigestion, they fart punctuation and random capitalization, which is then reflected in the book.
Mycroft also devises a way to enter books, and it is through this that someone steals Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre. Without it, the book of course isn’t worth reading.
Who hasn’t thought they would like to enter their favorite book?
And, as it turns out, the Jane Eyre of Thursday’s world doesn’t end the way it does in ours. And Thursday ultimately changes it, which sparks a whole other debate by purists and those who couldn’t stand the way it ended before.
Thursday’s world includes one where dodos have been brought back from extinction, and are easily cloned with a kit at home.
A bit of wry humor and commentary here and there with stabs at pop culture, trashy Danielle Steel-type novels, consumerism and corporate sponsorships.
There are sly nods here and there to the fact that Thursday Next herself is part of a book. And in a move beyond cleverness, Fforde goes on to put Thursday in the fiction world herself, in Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots.
I’m not doing the books justice, and they’re something so refreshingly out of the ordinary that they’re well worth the read.

And there’s three more where that came from. I’m most of the way through the fourth book, Something Rotten.
Again, hysterical. Goliath Corporation is trying to make itself into a faith-based corporate management system. An evil politician, Yorrick Kaine, escaped into the real world some years ago, and is busy trying to get himself named dictator of England by waging a smear and hysteria campaign against the Danish.
I have my suspicions about where this is going: after all, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet has been brought into the real world temporarily.
Hilarious.
Highly recommend the whole series. My only regret is that I’ll have to wait a while for the next Thursday Next book.