How is a raven like a writing desk?

Because Poe wrote on both of them! The book for this week's review (and the source of the answer to the riddle from Alice in Wonderland) is "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde. This is the first book in a series about literary detective Thursday Next. Fforde creates an alternate universe where the entire population of England takes their literature very serious (there are groups that maintain the Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare and thousands of people have legally changed their name to John Milton). Crimes of a literary nature (like forgeries of great works) are investigated by literary detectives like Thursday Next. The novel opens with the theft of the original manuscript of Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit". Determining the thief of manuscript leads to Thursday chasing a criminal mastermind who later steals the original manuscript of "Jane Eyre". As those who know me well, you can imagine that I love this book (and the rest in the series). The books are full of references to the classics (for example in the second book, Thursday become the protege of Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations"). The world that Fforde created is a good mix of quirky and serious that it isn't too outlandish and crazy. I discovered the second book in the series ("Lost in a Good Book") at a used bookstore in West Virginia (it is a publishing company's in house copy, I'm not sure how it ended up in a used bookstore in a small town in West Virginia). I have all the books in the series (there are 5 all together) but there was a bit a space between the second and the third one so I am planning on rereading the 2nd one before I start the third one (and the fourth and fifth).