Reading...

The joys of a three hour commute on London's commuter rail network are few and far between, so I should thank the fact that it lets me read for extended stretches of time. I weave in and out of periods when I don't touch fiction at all, but I stumbled on a couple of authors lately who have repaid the effort.
(My usual tactic for discovering new authors is to pick up interesting looking titles during my thrift shop browsing [God bless Oxfam Bookshops, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research and all of the others!] and then follow up on the author if it seems worthwhile. )
The first was Jasper Fforde, who's whimsical without being twee, inventive without being a complete showoff about it and often quite funny. At the same time, there is a level of commentary underneath it that's quite sharp as well.
Start with 'The Eyre Affair', work your way through 'Lost in a Good Book' and 'The Well of Lost Plots' and finish with 'Something Rotten' - all of which feature his heroine Thursday Next. She's a cop or a detective of sorts, in an England (and occasionally Wales) that is ever so slightly different. Well, different enough that the Crimean War was still going into the 1980s... He's recently started another series, with 'The Big Over Easy' and 'The Fourth Bear', which I haven't gotten to yet.
Given the growth of his writing across the successive books in the Thursday Next series, he seems to be just getting started, so he should be fun to watch. He has an excellent, if rather busy, website that's well worth a visit, at www.jasperfforde.com

The second author who's not new by any means, but new to me, is Jonathan Coe. At last count he had at least six novels in print, but he made his mark with 'What a Carveup', 'The House of Sleep' was well-acclaimed and 'The Rotters Club' was a huge success. There is a sequel to 'The Rotter's Club' as well - 'The Closed Circle'.
I bought 'The Rotter's Club' and started it - halfway through I ran out to the shops to pick up everything else by him! I then went on to 'What a Carve-up' and am halfway through 'The Closed Circle'.
He's ambitious, expansive, funny and quite pointed in his social commentary. 'What ...' brought out comparisons to Dickens, but for me, he's a lot closer to Robertson Davies, who had the misfortune to be Canadian and thus almost obscure for today's readers. He has the same effortless sweep, encompassing families and mini-dynasties, stretching across decades and creating characters who you can care for. Very highly recommended.