Lost in a Good Book

I’m supposed to be making progress through The Vital Question but instead I got Lost in a Good Book. Several actually. It’s hard to resist the wacky writing of Jasper Fforde in his Thursday Next series. I’ve now read the first three: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, and The Well of Lost Plots. While I’ve known about Fforde’s books for a while, I resisted starting on the series not having read Jane Eyre, nor much other literature for that matter. However, sometime in the last two years I watched the movie on DVD (the lazy way of learning the story). Since I’m on holiday and my sister has the first four books in a precious boxed-set, I thought I’d start on The Eyre Affair.

It didn’t matter that I could not remember most of the Jane Eyre story. I’m sure I also missed the multiple references to other ‘great’ works of literature. But for those that I did notice, they added richness to the lunatic narrative. It’s difficult to define the genre of Fforde’s writing. It’s like a cross between Once Upon A Time and Continuum, although it precedes both TV series (and is much better than both). If you want a good dose of literature and languages, techno-wizardry and time-jumping, than the adventures of Thursday Next, the plucky heroine (yes, that is her name) might be up your alley. Words are the main feature of the books. Grammar suddenly becomes interesting when pesky and potentially fatal grammasites attack you. A mispelling vyrus can be equally deadly.

I don’t know much about Fforde, and his Wikipedia entry is rather thin. But he has many admirers. There is an annual Fforde Fiesta, billing itself as “the gathering of fans of Jasper Fforde and those who like to embrace absurdity”. His writing may be absurd, but I found it very educational – in the sense that it made me want to broaden my horizons and learn more. I had a similar feeling watching snippets of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton on YouTube. I did not know much about Alexander Hamilton, but I started learning more. Fforde and Miranda are motivators for the quintessential liberal arts education and life-long learning. They’ve done a lot of work re-packaging what one might have encountered as dry history and boring literature and made it come alive!

In the third book, Thursday Next is introduced to Generics – characters who don’t quite have a role or personality yet and are “in training”. They are eager and fast learners. Our brains seem to be wired for learning. Watching a child learn is miraculous – the fluidity, the speed, the delight. Then we beat out curiosity and love of learning through a system of education borrowed from the industrialists and the military, where efficiency and standardization reign. This does not stop learning per se, but it constrains school lessons into bitter medicine, and learners turn elsewhere for their sweets. Computers and the internet has widened the choice of such delights. The immersive worlds (of Warcraft and many others) reward the learning of its myriad and intricate details. Just ask any enthusiast and you will be amazed at their knowledge.

Sadly, life-after-school becomes work – another chore, where creativity in many cases might draw reprimands from a supervisor. In that sense, I’m very fortunate to be an academic working at a university where I can be creative in my classes and in my scholarship, for the most part without the higher-ups breathing down my neck to be more “efficient”. That doesn’t mean my work is easy – it is challenging, but pleasurably so. Computer game designers have figured out the sweet spot for their target audience: there must be both frustration and reward, in a virtuous cycle that leads to increasingly more difficult challenges. I love puzzles. If they are too easy, I lose interest quickly. If too difficult, I give up in frustration. Finding the students’ zone of proximal development can be tricky, and it’s a moving target. This is the challenge for me as a teacher, embedded in a much larger edifice that rewards efficiency and throughput. But is that simply the nature of nature? The Vital Question argues that increasing the efficiency of energy transduction to drive entropy generation drove the evolution of life.

A liberal arts education, I would hope, leads to the creativity of a Jasper Fforde who can step outside the box, mix genres, introduce novelty, and make the reader think. Here’s one of those thoughtful passages from The Well of Lost Plots. A regular resident is explaining to the main protagonist part of how the BookWorld works, and by extension the magic of books and reading.

“Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process. The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer – perhaps more.”

I should get back to The Vital Question, although Fforde actually poses one possible solution to the enriching primordial broth that led to the origin-of-life. You might have guessed that it involves time-travel. (I’ve speculated on this here. Fforde’s version however is much wackier with a back story, or maybe it’s a front story.) To find out, you’ll have to get Lost in a Good Book.