My review of Jasper Fforde’s newest novel, Shades of Grey, is online over at The Book Book blog.

Maybe I’m just lucky to have read and savored everything else which Fforde has written. His work is without peer, I think — not necessarily in the sense of “none better,” more in the vein of “nothing else like it.” He’s endlessly inventive, does not take himself too seriously, always takes the story seriously, and somehow — despite his literally fantastic plots and alternate-universe settings and characters — escapes categorization as a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. He probably belongs the “Pantheon” list in the right sidebar here. I desperately want his job.

In any event: Shades of Grey is highly recommended for readers who don’t mind being challenged by strange, even slightly loopy ideas, and who can recognize tongue-in-cheekery when they see it.

For more on the plot and so on, check the Book Book review. And of course, feel free to ask questions here (or over there) if you’d like.

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On another note…

You may notice signs of some construction here for a little while. From time to time I think about messing with the overall “look” of the blog, but that’s not likely to happen; I’ve invested too much time in customizing what I’ve already got.

So far, two changes:

• I replaced the ever-expanding list of month-by-month archives, in the left sidebar, with a little calendar doo-dad which lets you move around among the stacks here. Once you’ve got a particular month displayed, you can see the titles of posts from that month by clicking on the little «-» link below the calendar proper.
• At the bottom of the left sidebar, there’s now a list of my five most recent Google Buzz entries. I keep finding these little Webly tidbits which are hard for me to justify turning over to a whole blog post, but which I think might be interesting to what passes as my “readership” at Running After My Hat. At the same time, this obviates the need for you to “follow my Buzz!” or whatever the hell cheerful thing Google is calling it in Gmail.

Not sure what else I might fool with. The list of categories bugs me a little, but I haven’t really given much thought what (if anything) to do with it. In the meantime, as someone or other has been saying around the Web since the early 1990s, I’ll try to keep the sawdust to a minimum.