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Out of all the books on the Shakespeare shelf at Paris' Kilometer Zero, this is the one that struck the most intrigue, along the same lines as Collins' Book of William. So far, so good with it covering much of the same ground as other Folio-based studies, yet also adding logical conclusions to why scholars get led down erroneous paths. It seems that Shakespeare simply had a knack for making good plays better and his.

Taymor is one of the best directors and it is great to see her write so much about my new favorite movie The Tempest. She could write her own book on adapting Shakespeare, or better yet, I could write it for her! Franco, on the other hand, could have written a bit more on Henry IV and bit less of his man-crush on River Phoenix, but all is good when discussing the Bard, as Allende eloquently sums up.

Finally got to the end of this strange journey into a land that does not exist, yet! It seems like Will's hot spring vacation really did change his mind, perhaps proving truth behind the old adage there's something in the water. While it is easy to see why this hippie-happening place had such a sudden appeal, I wonder what style of writing Weston would have adopted with his Ecotopian citizenship officially conferred.

Taking part in the ritual war game is a daring example of participatory investigative journalism, and sets up what could be as close to a climax as this book may have. Being seriously injured and sent to a hospital staffed with attractive nurses - who hasn't had that fantasy before? But to end up bickering about whether Marissa will come to New York proves that William cannot yet grasp the brave west coast new world.

"Lovers, poets and madmen" plus a couple of Dames take to their keyboards to write about Shakespeare's fools, heroines and tragic lovers. Many of the essays in this section express the age-old problem with performing any type of theatre: plenty of female interest in the plays yet a disproportionate number of roles for women to play compared to what men get to do. Eve Best explains how Beatrice and Lady M are sisters.

More fun on the alternate west coast, first visiting the plastic hamster tubes that makes affordable, environmental homes, then the decentralizing of higher education, finally the bottom falling out of the arts funding for musicians and other poorly supported artists. Seems like bit more trouble in paradise mentioned in these chapters than in earlier one. Could it be that Weston is getting weary of the new new world?

An intriguing week for Will, first being tipped off about the Helicopter War, then seeing new style of project-based learning nature school, and finding the official Ecotopian war story. A turning point for the development of a sustainably strong independence. Teaching children to fend for themselves in the woods has a wonderful environmental angle, while wire-trailing rockets an elegant way to defend from USA hawks!

While the first half of these collected essays had many ups and downs, Carson arranges to have the more scholarly articles cluster around the three-quarter mark. Some very deep observations from Scholar and Fletcher reminded me of what I like most about reading Shakespeare: the intertextual notes. However it is Dromgoole's, the best one so far, which showed me why seeing the plays makes their magic.

Who are these people writing about Shakespeare? More a rhetorical question, as each author has a short bio before their article. But the question bears repeating: who are they, really? Actors who played many roles, artists cashing in on the cultural capitol, writers who casually drop the "f" bomb like it has never been done in academic papers? Posing as a scholar, yet not citing anyone else, it all opinion, not art..

How much footwork did the creator of this utopian future nation do? How many progressive professors or chatty Berkeley undergrads did he borrow from to write insightfully on plastics, politics and economic overhaul? Nothing really is perfect in Ecotopia, as Will Weston finds out from every informant he meets, but a whole lot better than what his United States and my environmentally-backwards Canada has got going on.

And in addition to so many environmentally-friendly concepts that seem to have their origin in these pages, Callenbach may have also written a Hunger Games forerunner by having the declining but not quite done population participate in Ritual War Games. William continues to be surprised and aghast by Ecotopian culture, but writes as many foreigners feel when experiencing culture shock in a strange new world.

Reading LIAGB the second time, the last three chapters are where the entire Nextian world started to click and make this, Nursery Crime and everything else Fforde has written my favourite reads in the past decade. What sold me was Colonel Next's Dream Topping solution, and what I noticed this time around was Fforde's hint that Goliath Corp. exists in a sideways world with "a different name" - I know it starts with G!

Hit a rough patch in the otherwise well-intentioned book, and it is the anti-academic stance taken by some of the actors and authors. It is their own business how much they want to understand from scholars, many of whom may have lost sight of the forest by examining individual trees. Yet to present their own interpretations as real is like removing every leaf from this forest and admiring the beauty of bare branches.

The constant shifts in genre, from Supreme Evil Being hunting to police procedural to Jane Austen may be a mental work-out unlike most novels, but in Fforde's narrative they all seem to have well-crafted logic behind them. He may have tipped off readers to another one of his authorial inspirations when Miss Havisham mention grammasites in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the protohypertext story I have yet to read.

Some of the points during Weston's exploration of Ecotopia feel as if he actually did visit now to see the newfangled as though they were Ecotopian staples: videophones (Skype), car-free zones, and yoga gear (Lululemon). All that is missing are white paper coffee cups. It's during his sexually-frustrated soliloquies that the book reveals its mid-1970's vibe. Thank god for Marissa, he's not so much a Ziggy gone horny.

Entering the BookWorld and tumbling through fictional settings is a fine thing, but giving new life to familiar characters like the Cheshire Cat, Miss Havisham and the Trial's magistrate is entirely something else, requiring a complex understanding of possibilities existing alongside characters as they are written. Back to the RealWorld and the Next family: Joffy, Mum (Mother's Day) and Dad with travel tips.

Definitely not your typical theory-based collection of essays nor a paint-by-numbers guide to understanding the plays, Carson takes an apt approach by letting those who have lived with Shakespeare to write about both him and it. Once I got past a troubling foreward by an overly zealous Harold Bloom, the humble essays are thoughtful and witty. I detect the pattern of dull school lessons followed by electrifying shows.

It looks like I will need to develop my inner entroposcope while reading this book, as coincidences are running high. Not only I am reading this book, day by day, according to when the journalist Weston writes them, but my interest in this 21st century tale (written one year after I was born) has some key moments of my life charted in them. Who knew this book would be noticed by my pro-tem while talking ecocriticism?

Mycroft's timely introduction of the entroposcope helps Thursday, and no doubt many series readers, see through the coincidences and realize the book being read is alive and adapting to the reader's own life. Perhaps there is no coincidence that I finally got to the chapters on Gravitubes and visiting Japan on the same day as my wife returned home for a short visit (with the same novel in her carry-on). See Ecotopia.

Of all the fascinating directions narratives go, and the breezy way of dispensing with exposition, my favourite part so far is the discovery of the lost Cardenio script, and just the thrill of what it might be like to read a play as originally penned by Shakespeare. Of course, Mycroft's inventions, such as Nextian geometry, are the chapters where I wonder why this RealWorld is not as fun as Fforde's fiction.

Tolstoy's first written narrative seems to be an interloper's guide to becoming a djigit, or as his Russian hero Olenin finds out from his interaction with burly Cossacks, how to be a wjigit. He leaves Moscow in the snowy stillness for sultry summer on the Terek River, wild frontier for the expanding empire. There he falls for a local girl and learns a valuable lesson about joining groups or remaining alone.

Remembering back to when I first read this book, not having yet read the original Jane Eyre, or knowing much about the authorship question, spacetime dynamics, Wales or even who Sherlock Holmes' brother is, it was still an exciting read. Now that I am somewhat more familiar with all of the above, I can appreciate the amount of planning that went into the creation of the first novel Douglas Adams would enjoy.

Two curiously incongruent influences which Fforde includes here are Shakespeare and Fleming. As much as he toys with the authorship possibility as national craze, there is a sense that the character truly have a life independent of the author. So it is with Christopher Sly. James Bond, on the other hand, appears nowhere, but the spirit of the spy series: flashy cars and guns right down to silly names, is omnipresent.

Thursday's return to Swindon and acquainting herself with characters new, old and related provides a bevy of backstory, and has lots to do with the Crimean War. As luck would have it, I just started reading Tolstoy's Cossacks which has, in the Penguin Classic edition, maps of the war-torn peninsula, currently (as in 1985) occupied by England - even mention of German occupation of Swindon during a second war?

Really impressed, on the second time around, how much of everything related to Thursday Next has been included in the first seven chapters: an enigmatically ranked SpecOp force, alternate eventlines for world wars, a Japanese tourist inspiring uncle Mycroft and even mention of a quarkbeast! I heard that Fforde had many different versions of the story, and other stories it seems, long before publishers gave him a yes.

For the couple supposedly central to his eponymous tale, Martin and Mary are curiously absent from the four weddings and one major comeuppance that finishes off this wandering storyline. Even the now-childless neighbours from Eden make more of a narrative impact on Mark than any signs of the former emigrant reunited with his love. And Dickens leaves it up to Tom and his kindhearted sister to account for his concerns.

So close to the end, and so much new soil gets turned over, even characters seem to be overturned. Young Martin a bitter suitor, Mark Tapley less than his jolly self, Mrs Gamp being useful (at last) but her attachment to Mrs Harris brought into question, and Old Martin a shrewd judge of character! All these twists, but why was Tom Pinch brought so low as to shed a tear upon his book? Let's see "when rogues fall out"!

Inspired by a very short intro to the life and writing of Carl Jung, I am excited to get started on the life-writing of his autobiography. I sense that there will be alchemical aspects to turning lived experiences into symbols, otherwise known as the Roman alphabet, and his colleague and collaborator Aniela Jaffé is kind enough to write about her subject's objections to what he calls her project in the introduction.

In Jasper Fforde's novel The Eyre Affair, the villain Acheron Hades kidnaps a minor character from Martin Chuzzlewit called Quaverley, who is killed and therefore never appears in Dickens' story. I wondered who this overlooked character might have been based upon, and the hen-pecked Moddle seems a close cousin to the extinguished Quaverley. Other characters like Tigg are done in, yet Gamp survives!

The sum-up takes the reader back to the boy sitting on a stone and leaves us with a man forever gazing at the stars - by odd coincidence (or perhaps some numinosity amongst the pages read today) that Pecksniff finishes off Chapter 44 (of MC) gazing up at the stars with entirely materialistic thoughts in his mind. I will follow the former's example and live my life with less attention to opinions and slogans.