Books on Review: Thursday Next
As it's the beginning of a new year, I thought I'd try to start something new- keeping track of what I read. Considering my voraciousness, it should be interesting to see how well I keep up with myself.
So I just finished off my recent Jaspar Fforde acquisition, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.
While still taking place after the fourth novel, there's a fifteen year gap between the two. Next Junior no longer speaks solely in Lorem Ipsum, and instead is in a grunge band and has absolutely no urge to do as his timeline says and join the Chronoguard (the time police, sometimes corrupt, sometimes not, and always in a hurry because there's never enough time). Apparently they've been using time travel under the assumption it will be invented (be it in five years or fifty thousand) and, as it turns out, it won't be invented and Junior is supposed to sign up and fix the problem. Otherwise the world ends. Thursday's got more problems within BookWorld- there's been books written about her and the book!Thursdays want to join Jurisfiction (the book police) too. Unfortunately, they're both useless- one's all action and no thought, the other has the opposite problem. On top of that, nobody's interested in reading anymore and the Council of Genres has a smashing good idea of how to pick up their read rates- reality books! Just like reality television, except now you're voting out the boring Dashwoods. Pride and Prejudice will never be the same. Unfortunately.
Fforde does to literature what Douglas Adams did for science fiction. Just likes Adams pulled Arthur Dent from his safe reality and tossed him head-first into an explosion of silliness and space ships and talking mice, so Fforde pulls Next from her police work into Shakespeare fakes and throws her into the actual books themselves, setting fire to Jane Eyre's Thornfield Manor and fighting over romance box sets with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen and setting new car-racing speed records with Great Expectations Miss Havisham. It's all completely implausible and practically slapstick, and yet while you're reading, it sounds real and you're at the edge of your seat hoping she'll get the best of those evil bastards at GoliathCorp.
The tie-ins from The Eyre Affair were impressive- the Future-Friday at her wedding telling her to persuade any children she has to not join the Chronoguard was expected to return at some point- provided you've read the book more than once so it'd stick better in your memory- but I had to reread it to find something mentioned completely in passing that became ultra-important for First Among Sequels. One has to wonder if he's like Neil Gaiman and just puts those things in as built-in 'just in cases' or if he was rereading The Eyre Affair himself and went "that's a brilliant idea, I need that."
He's left me rather scared of entering Poetry though. And glad that I never give ethics lectures. Those hypothetical people have lives too, you know.
A couple of the Thursday Next books have illustrated frontispieces, but this one includes illustrations in the actual text. While necessary for a certain section- she leaves the emergency exit of a book to enter a different book and whilst doing so, there can be no text- the one I've got a complaint with was merely an illustration of an amusing scene. While seeing Spike pinned to the ceiling using kitchen utensils was hilarious, I'd been visualizing him as looking similar to John Constantine (from the comics, not the movie), so seeing him looking like a Rastafarian in a trench coat was something of a let down. On the other hand, it makes it easier visualizing what his daughter looks like. I'd just stuck a Caucasian Generic in for her, but now I'm kinda seeing her looking like a younger version of Naomi Harris. (The black chick in 28 Days Later. For those of you who haven't seen that, she's also the obeah woman in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.)
Anyways, on to the next book. Perhaps the Sorcery and Cecelia books that Katie got me. =)
So I just finished off my recent Jaspar Fforde acquisition, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.
While still taking place after the fourth novel, there's a fifteen year gap between the two. Next Junior no longer speaks solely in Lorem Ipsum, and instead is in a grunge band and has absolutely no urge to do as his timeline says and join the Chronoguard (the time police, sometimes corrupt, sometimes not, and always in a hurry because there's never enough time). Apparently they've been using time travel under the assumption it will be invented (be it in five years or fifty thousand) and, as it turns out, it won't be invented and Junior is supposed to sign up and fix the problem. Otherwise the world ends. Thursday's got more problems within BookWorld- there's been books written about her and the book!Thursdays want to join Jurisfiction (the book police) too. Unfortunately, they're both useless- one's all action and no thought, the other has the opposite problem. On top of that, nobody's interested in reading anymore and the Council of Genres has a smashing good idea of how to pick up their read rates- reality books! Just like reality television, except now you're voting out the boring Dashwoods. Pride and Prejudice will never be the same. Unfortunately.
Fforde does to literature what Douglas Adams did for science fiction. Just likes Adams pulled Arthur Dent from his safe reality and tossed him head-first into an explosion of silliness and space ships and talking mice, so Fforde pulls Next from her police work into Shakespeare fakes and throws her into the actual books themselves, setting fire to Jane Eyre's Thornfield Manor and fighting over romance box sets with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen and setting new car-racing speed records with Great Expectations Miss Havisham. It's all completely implausible and practically slapstick, and yet while you're reading, it sounds real and you're at the edge of your seat hoping she'll get the best of those evil bastards at GoliathCorp.
The tie-ins from The Eyre Affair were impressive- the Future-Friday at her wedding telling her to persuade any children she has to not join the Chronoguard was expected to return at some point- provided you've read the book more than once so it'd stick better in your memory- but I had to reread it to find something mentioned completely in passing that became ultra-important for First Among Sequels. One has to wonder if he's like Neil Gaiman and just puts those things in as built-in 'just in cases' or if he was rereading The Eyre Affair himself and went "that's a brilliant idea, I need that."
He's left me rather scared of entering Poetry though. And glad that I never give ethics lectures. Those hypothetical people have lives too, you know.
A couple of the Thursday Next books have illustrated frontispieces, but this one includes illustrations in the actual text. While necessary for a certain section- she leaves the emergency exit of a book to enter a different book and whilst doing so, there can be no text- the one I've got a complaint with was merely an illustration of an amusing scene. While seeing Spike pinned to the ceiling using kitchen utensils was hilarious, I'd been visualizing him as looking similar to John Constantine (from the comics, not the movie), so seeing him looking like a Rastafarian in a trench coat was something of a let down. On the other hand, it makes it easier visualizing what his daughter looks like. I'd just stuck a Caucasian Generic in for her, but now I'm kinda seeing her looking like a younger version of Naomi Harris. (The black chick in 28 Days Later. For those of you who haven't seen that, she's also the obeah woman in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.)
Anyways, on to the next book. Perhaps the Sorcery and Cecelia books that Katie got me. =)