Teaser Tuesday: The Eyre Affair

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The book for this week's teaser was a pretty quirky read. It's got all kinds of oddities, like a father whose face stops time, genetically reproduced dodo birds as pets, and all the overly obvious names in reference to literature (Paige Turner? Really?). But I read a lot of Neil Gaiman so I am used to the weirdness. I wouldn't go so far as to call this steampunk, but The Eyre Affair is an alternate reality, where times is flexble, literature is protected sometimes violently, and Jane Eyre never went back to Thornfield Hall.  I like how on the back of the book the main character is described in a quote from the NYT as "part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry."

Thursday Next is a LiteraTec Agent, charged with protecting true literature from fraud. However, she has a hidden ability, one that allows her to step into a novel, something she's only done quite by accident. When she's moved to a top secret agency to find a dangerous criminal from her past, Thursday isn't prepared for the aftermath. Seeking a place to collect herself and to discover the truth of what happened, Thursday returns to her hometown, where she must save the most famous works of writing from a madman. If she can get past her ex-fiance, estranged commanding officer, corporate corruption, and genius mad scientist uncle. 

Like I said…quirky.

Here's the Teaser:

"Ordinarily I would not have believed that Rochester could have torn himself from the pages of Jane Erye and come to my aid that night; such a thing is, of course, quite impossible. I might have dismissed the whole thing as a ludicrously complicated prank had it not been for one thing: Edward Rochester and I had met once before…"

- pg. 62, The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

What are you reading?