The book on my nightstand right now, and one I like enough that I’ve been taking it other places, is Jasper Fforde’s Lost in a good book. It’s the second book in a trilogy that takes place in an alternate reality Earth (mostly in 1984) where all of society is centered around literature. Thousands of people have legally changed their names to those of prominent literary characters and luminaries (e.g. Nate Hawthorne845, Anne Hathaway14), forgeries of lost sonnets are a thriving black market trade, and finding an authentic original Shakespeare signature would be front page news for weeks.

After being lost in such a good book for the last few days, it’s understandable that my sense of reality gets a bit skewed, and so it’s completely disorienting to see today’s Google logo, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, from James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would happen in Fforde’s world, the world I’ve been escaping to for the last week before going to sleep, and suddenly it’s as if my own reality is a crossover work. Dizzying, but cool.