Tag Archives: Jasper Fforde

Booked

First Among Sequels (Jasper Fforde)

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Rating: [rate 4.5]

First Among Sequels (Jasper Fforde) It is fourteen years since Thursday Next pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop, and the Special Operations Network has been disbanded. Using Swindon’s Acme Carpets as a front, Thursday and her colleagues Bowden, Stig and Spike continue their same professions, but illegally.

Of course, this front is itself a front for Thursday’s continued work at Jurisfiction, the Policing agency within the bookworld, and she is soon grappling with a recalcitrant new apprentice, an inter-genre war or two, and the inexplicable departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardy books.

As the Council of Genres decree that making books interactive will boost flagging readership levels and Goliath attempt to perfect a trans-fictional tourist coach, Thursday finds herself in the onerous position of having to side with the enemy to destroy a greater evil that threatens the very fabric of the reading experience.

With Aornis Hades once again on the prowl, an idle sixteen-year-old son who would rather sleep in than save the world from the end of time, a government with a dangerously high stupidity surplus and the Swindon Stiltonistas trying to muscle in on her cheese-smuggling business, Thursday must once again travel to the very outer limits of acceptable narrative possibilities to triumph against increasing odds.
[from jasperfforde.com]

Finally I got a copy of this book! I’ve waited for a YEAR to get this one on paperback and thank God I found one last weekend. :) How I missed reading about Thursday Next!

Thursday is back, and it’s fourteen years later. It’s 2002, and things are fine, but not quite. Friday is not being the ChronoGuard trainee he is supposed to be, her uncle Mycroft who died six years ago is showing up as a ghost but he has no idea how, less and less people are reading books and more focused on reality shows and MP3 players, and she has to keep her undercover freelance SpecOps work and Jurisfiction duties from her love, Landen. Oh, and she has to train a Jurisfiction cadet, who is no other than Thursday Next-5, the character from a book based on her. Oh, and the world as they know it could end in a few days if Friday doesn’t shape up…yeah, everything’s fine. ;)

I won’t spoil anyone by revealing more of the plot, but if you’re new to Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next, I won’t recommend getting this book since there’s a lot of references from the previous four books. Also, if you haven’t read any of the Next novels in a while, it might take a while before you can really get with the flow of the story.

It’s a great read, and if you’re a Fforde fan you musn’t miss this. :D I did find some parts kind of dragging, but it builds up nicely up to the end, and it has such a cliffhanger ending that I can’t wait for the next one …which won’t be out until 2009.

But read it! This book series is best for people who likes books as well, so if you’re a certified bookworm, this is one book you should add to your must-reads! :D

Randomnities

Sunday Randomness

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The last time I sat here at Robinson’s Galleria’s Starbucks with my laptop (ole Ginger, not Aslan) was back November 2006, where I sat at the corner, busy writing my NaNoWriMo novel. That was such a long time ago…I can’t believe it’s been more than a year. :) That was way before I did some admin job search…which was more than a year ago too. Now I’m back, because I’m sick of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and nothing beats Starbucks’ iced mocha (but I’m saying that only because I think it tastes like their Dark Mocha…or does it?). However, there’s always so many people here, it’s hard to find a nice seat where I can be privy to my own thoughts. Bah. :P I miss Seattle’s Best.

Before I continue, let me just say that the previous paragraph sounded so elitistang burgis, as my thesismate would say. :P

On another note, I bought two books yesterday. I was originally planning to buy only one, so I dropped by Bestsellers to see if Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next novel (First Among the Sequels) is already available in paperback. I didn’t find it there, but I really wanted to get a book to read (this is beside the fact that I have two unread books at the condo — Pride and Prejudice and Wicked, but I don’t feel like reading them), so I ended up getting something fluffy: The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. After staying at Coffee Bean, I went around the mall for a while and decided to visit National Bookstore. Lo and behold, there was the paperback version of the first book I was hunting. Of course I bought it. :D I’m more than halfway done, and I kind of had a hard time adjusting to Fforde’s world again, but after a few pages, I’m back on track. I love this series, and if you haven’t read it, well, go to your nearest bookstore and grab a copy of The Eyre Affair or The Big Over Easy! If you like reading books, you’d love this series — I mean that literally! :)

All these book talk suddenly reminded me: Book Fair is just around the corner! Ack, does this mean more books to be added to my To-Be-Read pile? Looks like it.^^;

And now from books, we go to writing. I’ve had a lot of alone time this weekend and I’m sad to say I did not do one bit of writing. :( I hardly even touched my journal. Sure, I carry it around, but I haven’t really gotten down to write anything on it. Ack, I suck. Aside from blogging and emails, my creative writing has taken a break. And I miss it. I so want to write something, maybe even a bit connected to what’s happening right now, or even write some bits of the novel I’m planning to write this year…but it’s either I’m too lazy to do so, or whenever I try to write, I just come out dry. :| This is one of the times I wish I had a friend like Thursday Next to get me a plot device from the BookWorld to play with my stories. Or…maybe I just need to exert more effort. :P

I’m getting out of Starbucks in a while to hear mass and probably go back to the condo to check if our bathroom is dry and mop it up if it’s not (don’t ask), and then head back here to get dinner and invade another coffee shop. Oh and probably buy that cute white shoes at Celine. Tomorrow’s the start of another work week, and I’m ready to conquer it (I think).

This random post is brought to you by Lifehouse, an iced mocha drink, the letter A and the number 427. Don’t ask. :P

Booked

The Well of Lost Plots (Jasper Fforde)

Rating: [rate 5]

The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde“Anything is possible in the BookWorld. The only barriers are those of the human imagination.”
– Miss Havisham

Protecting the world’s greatest literature — not to mention keeping up with Miss Havisham — is tiring work for an expectant mother. And Thursday can definitely use a respite. So what better hideaway than inside the unread and unreadable Caversham Heights, a cliche-ridden pulp mystery in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well itself is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books — like Caversham Heights — are scrapped for salvage. To top it off, a murderer is stalking Jurisfiction personnel and nobody is safe — least of all Thursday.

This is the third novel in the Thursday Next novels, which tells of Thursday’s first adventures in the BookWorld while she “rests” from the real world. She resides in Caversham Heights as a part of the Character Exchange Program, lives in a houseboat with two Generics ibb and obb (eventually named Lola and Randolph), her pet dodo Pickwick who is warming her egg and her 108-year old Granny Next. She is apprenticed under Miss Havisham and meets lots of books characters including Trafford Bradshaw, Vern Deane, the Bellman, the Cat formerly known as Cheshire, detective partners Perkins and Snell and the only other Outlander (meaning a real person), Harris Tweed. As well as trying to learn her way around the Book World and playing her role as DS Mary, partner of DCI Jack Spratt in a totally unreadable novel in danger of being scrapped, she also has to battle Aornis Hades’ mindworm which threatens to erase all her memory of her eradicated husband, Landen Parke-Laine.

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Booked

Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde)

Rating: [rate 4]

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FfordeHer adventures as a renowned Special Operative in literary detection have left Thursday Next yearning for a rest. But when the love of her life is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must bite the bullet and moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative in the secret world of Jurisfiction, the police force inside books. There she is apprenticed to Miss Havisham, the famous man-hater from Dickens’ Great Expectations, who teaches her to book-jump like a pro. If she retrieves a supposedly vanquished enemy from the pages of Poe’s “The Raven,” she thinks Goliath might return her lost love, Landen. But her latest mission is endlessly complicated. Not only are there side trips to the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself a target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth.

Well, that summary surely said enough. Lost in a Good Book is the sequel to The Eyre Affair, which picks up just about two weeks from the last novel. The book is just as fun to read as the last one, with all the new characters coming in especially the ones from fiction.

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Booked

The Big Over Easy (Jasper Fforde)

Rating: [rate 4.5]

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde (image courtesy of amazon.co.uk)Dead bodies never look like this.

It’s Easter in Reading — a bad time for eggs — and the shattered, tuxedo-clad corpse of a local businessman Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III has been found lying beneath a wall in a shabby part of town. Humpty was one of life’s good guys — so who would want him knocked off? And is it a coincidence that his ex-wife has just met with a sticky end down at the local biscuit factory?

A hardened cop on the mean streets of the Thomas Valley’s most dangerous precinct, DI Jack Spratt has seen it all, and something tells him this is going to be a tough case to crack… – blurb from the back of the book

We all know Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and had a great fall…but do we ever wonder why he fell? Jasper Fforde explores this idea in his first Jack Spratt novel, The Big Over Easy. The novel starts with the introduction of Detective Sergeant (DS) Mary Mary, who is applying for a job in the Reading Police Department. She’s a good detective, though she always ends up having to do difficult choices for herself. She thought she would be working with Friedland Chymes, her number one idol but as with every new employee, she had to start out low — in the Nursery Crime Division (NCD) under DI Jack Spratt.

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Booked

Something Rotten (Jasper Fforde)

Rating: [rate 5]

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde (image courtesy of Amazon.co.uk)Literary detective Thursday Next is on a mission — and it’s not just a mission to save the planet. If only life were that simple.

Unemployed following an international cheese-smuggling scandal, our favorite cultural crime-fighter is faced with a world of problems: Hamlet’s not attending his conflict resolution classes, President George Formby is facing a coup led by dastardly Yorrick Kaine and, what’s more, the evil Goliath Corporation are refusing to un-eradicate Thursday’s husband, Landen.

Will she ever see Landen again? Is shopping the new religion? Can Thursday prevent Armageddon? And who will babysit her son while she does it? – blurb from the back of the book

If you were (or still) a fan of Nancy Drew or have read Agatha Christie novels, you’d probably like Thursday Next. Thursday is Nancy Drew and Hercule Poirot thrown in a Harry Potter-like land: an alternate England where there is a special police department named Special Operatives (SpecOps) who deals with EVERYTHING (from literature to the undead), where having a stalker is normal, where time travel is possible and where dodos make good pets. What a world, eh? I definitely agree. :)

Something Rotten is actually the fourth Thursday Next novel in Mr. Fforde‘s Thursday Next series. In case you’re a new reader of his works (like me), you don’t have to worry about getting confused with the characters because more or less each character was re-introduced at the start of the novel. Thursday Next is a literary detective at SpecOps-27, the Literary Detective department (or LiteraTec) of the SpecOps. Thursday is also the head of Jurisfiction in the BookWorld and after living there for two years, she wanted a break for her to properly take care of her son Friday and to find a way to get her husband Landen back after being eradicated by the ChronoGuard (the time-travelling department of SpecOps — SO-12) when he was two. So she goes back to Swindon with her son, her pet dodo Pickwick and her son Alan and Hamlet the Prince of Denmark (who wanted to see if the reports about him from the real world a.k.a Outland is true). Thursday heads back home and tries to fix her life again (and to bring her husband back), but then finds herself under an assassination plot, responsible to get rid of Yorrick Kaine, a fictional character who got out of an unknown book and was planning to become a dictator and of course, to stop the world from ending. What’s new?

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