Currently Reading: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again, both by David Foster Wallace and both for a class. You’ll be seeing tons of excerpts from both of them for the next couple of months. And as my before bed, on the bus, in between classes reading, The Eyre Affair, first book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde.
Jasper Fforde writes some awesomely fun fiction. He creates these slightly (or sometimes drastically) different versions of our world that border on the geniusly bizarre.
In his Thursday Next series, the main character is a literary detective for the Jurisfiction department, which patrols the law inside books. Another of his series is the Nursery Crimes books, which features the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt, where he investigates what really happened in classic nursery rhymes. For a book nerd like me, they’re sort of perfect.
For his latest series, Shades of Grey, Fforde has created a future version of our world where social class is determined by one’s ability to perceive color. No one can see more than their own color, and no one knows why— there are many unknowns ever since The Something That Happened. It follows the main character of Eddie Russett, a Red, as he beginnings to discover the truth behind the world he lives in.
In the book, when a person turns 20, they take the Ishihara to determine what color and how high of a percentage of it they can see (the more you can see, the higher your rank will be).
Because the Ishihara is an actual test created to determine color-blindness, I used that as the basis for my design, having the title appear in red as Eddie would see it, among a sea of grey.
You can find out more about the book here.
These all sound absolutely fantastic and have definitely been added to my TBR list.
