First Among Sequels
by Jasper Fforde
|
|
| published
|
July 31st 2007
by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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| binding
| Hardcover |
| isbn
|
0340835753
(isbn13: 9780340835753)
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| pages
| 416 |
| date added
|
05-21-07
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bookshelves:
austen-stuff
Read in May, 2008
recommends it for:
Karen, David, other Fforde fans out there
Maybe it's because I haven't seen Thursday Next in a long time, but I really enjoyed this book!
I loved the scenes with her family - seeing son Friday as a grunty teenager whose only interest is playing guitar for his garage band, The Gobshites. (His parents are worried because he's slated to save the world 756 times, but is already three years behind schedule on his ChronoGuard career.) The scene about Thursday's daughter Jenny almost made me cry.
The plot is intricate and hard to follo...more
Maybe it's because I haven't seen Thursday Next in a long time, but I really enjoyed this book!
I loved the scenes with her family - seeing son Friday as a grunty teenager whose only interest is playing guitar for his garage band, The Gobshites. (His parents are worried because he's slated to save the world 756 times, but is already three years behind schedule on his ChronoGuard career.) The scene about Thursday's daughter Jenny almost made me cry.
The plot is intricate and hard to follow, but if you just go with it in a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of way, it's quite a ride. That Thursday has her own fictional self (Thursday5 from "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco") as a cadet trainee is awesome.
I still think "Eyre Affair" stands alone at the pinnacle of Fforde's work, but I was glad to be once again immersed in Thursday Next's world. Fforde just plain loves books and it's infectious.
Some favorite passages below:
A "dirty" bomb: "It's a tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature. The 'dirty' elements of the bomb fly apart at a preset time and attach themselves to any unshielded prose. Given the target, it has the potential for untold damage. A well-placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitative nature right into the middle of 'Mrs. Dalloway.'"
A strong cheese: "Machynlleth Wedi Marw... It'll bring you up in a rash just by looking at it. Denser than enriched plutonium, two grams can season enough macaroni and cheese for eight hundred men. The smell alone will corrode iron. A concentration of only seventeen parts per million will bring on nausea and unconsciousness within twenty seconds. Our chief taster ate a half ounce by accident and was dead to the world for six hours. Open only out of doors, and even then only with a doctor's certificate and well away from populated areas. It's not really a cheese for eating - it's more for encasing in concrete and dumping in the ocean a long way from civilization."
Schrodinger's Night Fever principle:
F: "It's simple. If you go to see 'Saturday Night Fever' expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too. Thus 'Saturday Night Fever' can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."
L: "I think I understand that. Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"
F: "Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Face/Off.' 'Battlefield Earth' doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and 'Get Shorty' doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions."
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author Jasper Fforde may have constructed his own literary version of a mirrored room in his ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) Thursday Next series, which began with The Eyre Affair and has recently come back to life after four books and one spin-off series with his new novel, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (Viking; $24.95). The series, set in an alternative England circa 1984-1999, features a young woman police detective in the Literatec Department, the division responsible for poli...more
author Jasper Fforde may have constructed his own literary version of a mirrored room in his ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) Thursday Next series, which began with The Eyre Affair and has recently come back to life after four books and one spin-off series with his new novel, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (Viking; $24.95). The series, set in an alternative England circa 1984-1999, features a young woman police detective in the Literatec Department, the division responsible for policing infractions against literature. Mostly, this meant rounding up fanatical Baconites a fundamentalist group that believed Shakespeare s plays were written by Francis Bacon but occasionally she is assigned more dangerous duties, such as guarding the original manuscript of Jane Eyre when it comes under threat from a terrorist. For this is an England where literature holds the same kind of public devotion and attention that rock stars and movie celebrities do in our world. There are a few other differences as well. The Crimean War is still going on, as it has been for a hundred years. Wales is an independent socialist republic. Genetic cloning is common, but mostly used by folks to create pets modeled on extinct prehistoric animals. (Thursday herself has a Dodo she calls Pickwick). Oh, and time travel is possible, but strictly regulated by a special division of the police called The Chronoguard. There are also some things that are quite familiar like the not-so-benevolent influence of a gigantic corporation called Goliath which bears not just a passing resemblance to Microsoft. This is the England we must assimilate when Thursday faces her first adventure, when a psychopath kidnaps Jane Eyre right out of the book and holds her for ransom.[return][return]Like many book people, I was initially charmed by the literary universe Fforde created. I liked its wackiness and the endless puns and its irreverent affection for all of English literature. I was vain enough to feel smug that I recognized the sources of most of the references, and had read most of the same books. I liked the endlessly inventive and satirical take on literature's tendency towards self-importance. A world where audiences respond to Shakespeare's Richard III the way that we do to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a world I wish I lived in! And I especially liked the basic premise, which is that fiction has a physical, corporeal presence in our lives, that the characters of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, and Heathcliff are REAL, the way the velveteen bunny is real.[return][return]Five books later, I find I am not feeling charmed so much as trapped at a party with a guy who keeps telling endless versions of the same joke. (A horse and monkey and a duck walk into a bar . . .) read the full review...less
Read in July, 2007
Thursday's back, in the first installment of her second four-book series; how I'd missed her.
Familiar ground is less familiar than I might have expected. It's 14 years later, SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday is working at a carpet company while England's love of reading (so prominent and charming in the world of the first series) has plummeted so far that bookstores no longer sell books and reality TV has resorted to titles like Samaritan Kidney Swap. It takes a couple of ch...more
Thursday's back, in the first installment of her second four-book series; how I'd missed her.
Familiar ground is less familiar than I might have expected. It's 14 years later, SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday is working at a carpet company while England's love of reading (so prominent and charming in the world of the first series) has plummeted so far that bookstores no longer sell books and reality TV has resorted to titles like Samaritan Kidney Swap. It takes a couple of chapters for one to get a footing.
All the old characters make an appearance, though, albeit usually brief ones, and the new characters (in particular, Thursday's kids) are engaging. Probably the ones with the most page-time are still Thursday... but the fictional Thursdays from the books written based on her experiences. This, you might imagine, gets even more meta than usual, as Thursday in the Bookworld mucks about with the first four books we've already read (and one we haven't).
As usual, the plot threads are myriad. The main plot involves a drastic plan to raise Outlander reading rates by turning the classics into interactive reality TV, but there are also bits about Felix8's return, Aornis's imprisonment, the evaluation and training of potential new Jurisfiction agents, and a really dangerous cheese.
Still, it's not my favorite Thursday book by a long shot. For one thing, it feels rushed (as it probably should, since it was written in seven months), which might explain why the Hodder first edition is missing all footnotes; in another book, that might not necessarily be a real problem, narrative-wise, but when Next communicates with Bookworld inhabititants via footnoterphone, we're literally missing half the conversation. For another, the dangling plot points feel more dangly than in previous books, probably because Fforde knows he has three more books in which to tie them to something, but it does hurt the novel's feel as a finished work unto itself.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but it's clearly not Fforde's best. And now that he's apparently committed to Thursday for his next three novels, I find myself craving another Nursery Crime book....less
If I have ever read a more raucous and joyful ode to reading than Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, then I have long forgotten it. Set in a fantastical alternate Britain, the series heroine is the titular Next who is a member of the Literary Detectives, a government organization that combats book crime, such as, say, the unlawful editing of books. How can such events occur? Well as it happens, what is written in books exists in it own dimension and if you were to enter that dimension, you co...more
If I have ever read a more raucous and joyful ode to reading than Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, then I have long forgotten it. Set in a fantastical alternate Britain, the series heroine is the titular Next who is a member of the Literary Detectives, a government organization that combats book crime, such as, say, the unlawful editing of books. How can such events occur? Well as it happens, what is written in books exists in it own dimension and if you were to enter that dimension, you could say, leech all the comedy out of the Thomas Hardy books and make them terrible tragedies, as some nasty did in these books.
Did that last bit make you chuckle or leave you confused? If it is the former, these books are for you. In addition to being entirely about books and reading, these stories are marked by an unrelenting tide of jokes. I can think of few books that I want to read that I can also call "madcap," but this is certainly one. One scene features a Beatrix Potter character conversing with a Ming the Merciless clone, over tea. It is a mark of Fforde's skill as a writer in that he can be so incredibly silly, while also sucking you into the (often nonsensical) story.
His latest book in the series, Thursday Next, First Among Sequels, may be his most enjoyable yet. Flinging from one crisis to another, Next deals with (as usual) threats to the BookWorld, the universe, declining read rates, her family and to her pet Dodo (genetically re-engineered, wouldn't you know). The pacing is among the most relentless in this volume, so that if one joke or encounter leaves you a bit dry, you will soon find another.
While I won't stoop to spoiling, I will say that this is a series that can read out of order if you so chose. Yes, certain personages fates will be known to you, but like as not, they have changed in bizarre ways, so that you will be surprised nonetheless. The fun here is in Fforde's seemingly bottomless invention and literary referencing. If you are an inveterate reader, then you need to try these books....less
bookshelves:
fiction-adult
Read in March, 2008
The wait in between Thursday Next novels was a dreary one indeed, so admittedly gratitude might skew the objectivity a bit.
Thursday (and company) are back years later. Thursday's precocious son Friday has morphed into a stereotype of a prickly teenager, and the dramatic drop in reading rates has forced Thursday into working freelance (when she can). Fforde follows a familiar pattern with this installment. As might be expected, a number of what would seem to be isolated bizarre incidents end...more
The wait in between Thursday Next novels was a dreary one indeed, so admittedly gratitude might skew the objectivity a bit.
Thursday (and company) are back years later. Thursday's precocious son Friday has morphed into a stereotype of a prickly teenager, and the dramatic drop in reading rates has forced Thursday into working freelance (when she can). Fforde follows a familiar pattern with this installment. As might be expected, a number of what would seem to be isolated bizarre incidents end up interconnected, the Chrono Guard and evil super-corporation Goliath look extremely suspicious, and and once again, the fate of the world is at stake. It may be a familiar pattern, but it usually makes for an enjoyable ride nevertheless. This time around however, Fforde struggles a bit with keeping all the balls in the air, and so the reader comes out of some of the scenes feeling slightly shortchanged. Quite a few familiar characters from the other books get little play, to turn the focus more fully on the inner workings of Thursday herself (who is forced to interact with two different representations of herself). This might sound promising (and I can't say that I missed Miss Tiggy-Winkle that profoundly) but unfortunately this aspect of the plot gets tied up far too neatly, while plenty of other threads are left hanging.
Not the strongest of the series so far, but any fan of Jasper Fforde will find plenty to be entertained by nonetheless. An encounter with a craftily camouflaged demon and a part involving the frantic juggling of pianos and elephants in the book world were especially funny. So entertaining, actually, that I found myself giggling out loud a few times times in public--you really have to give some credit to a book that will let you forget yourself like that. ...less
bookshelves:
characters-from-literature,
humorous-stories,
to-read
Book Description (from Amazon.com)
Literary sleuth Thursday Next is out to save literature in the fifth installment of Jasper Fforde’s wildly popular series
Beloved for his prodigious imagination, his satirical gifts, his literate humor, and sheer silliness, Jasper Fforde has delighted book lovers since Thursday Next first appeared in The Eyre Affair, a genre send-up hailed as an instant classic. Since the no-nonsense literary detective from Swindon made her debut, literature has never be...more
Book Description (from Amazon.com)
Literary sleuth Thursday Next is out to save literature in the fifth installment of Jasper Fforde’s wildly popular series
Beloved for his prodigious imagination, his satirical gifts, his literate humor, and sheer silliness, Jasper Fforde has delighted book lovers since Thursday Next first appeared in The Eyre Affair, a genre send-up hailed as an instant classic. Since the no-nonsense literary detective from Swindon made her debut, literature has never been quite the same. Neither have nursery rhymes, for that matter. With two successful books of the Nursery Crime series under his belt, Fforde takes up once again the brilliant adventures of his signature creation in the highly anticipated fifth installment of the Thursday Next series. And it’s better than ever.
It’s been fourteen years since Thursday pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop, and Friday is now a difficult sixteen year old. However, Thursday’s got bigger problems. Sherlock Holmes is killed at the Rheinback Falls and his series is stopped in its tracks. And before this can be corrected, Miss Marple dies suddenly in a car accident, bringing her series to a close as well. When Thursday receives a death threat clearly intended for her written self, she realizes what’s going on—there is a serial killer on the loose in the Bookworld. And that’s not all—The Goliath Corporation is trying to deregulate book travel. Naturally, Thursday must travel to the outer limits of acceptable narrative possibilities to triumph against increasing odds.
Packed with word play, bizarre and entertaining subplots, and old-fashioned suspense, Thursday’s return is sure to be celebrated by Jasper’s fanatical fans and the critics who have loved him since the beginning. ...less
Read in May, 2008
recommends it for:
People who like words put together to form stories
Jasper Fforde reminds me of a Douglas Adams who came from a happier home. (I have no idea what Adams' home life was like, but for the sake of analogy, humour me.) His humour is less biting, but just as madcap, his characters are kinder, and easier to like, but the surreality is, I think, just as strong, and listen to this nice bit of language on pianos: "Composed of 550lbs of iron, wood, strings, and felt, the 88-key instrument is capable of the most subtle of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive force of a family saloon moving at 20 miles per hour."
...more
Jasper Fforde reminds me of a Douglas Adams who came from a happier home. (I have no idea what Adams' home life was like, but for the sake of analogy, humour me.) His humour is less biting, but just as madcap, his characters are kinder, and easier to like, but the surreality is, I think, just as strong, and listen to this nice bit of language on pianos: "Composed of 550lbs of iron, wood, strings, and felt, the 88-key instrument is capable of the most subtle of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive force of a family saloon moving at 20 miles per hour."
If you read for plot, you're not going to like this book. In fact, if you read for narrative, you may not like it either: at one point, with the future of the time-stream in the balance, a chapter is taken off for an adventure in laying carpet. This interlude has no connection whatsoever to anything happening before or after; you either embrace this sort of thing, or go mad.
I can't remember if I've enthused about Thursday as a heroine, but really, she just keeps on getting better. She's an action heroine who doesn't carry a gun, (mostly), she's middle-aged, happily married with children, and not terribly good at communicating with her loved ones. She's female, but not highly gendered, and I think her hair colour may be mentioned once but I don't recall at the moment what it is.
This book is fairly standard for Fford, but he does two interesting things with the first-person narrator, neither of which I wish to spoil for you, so go read it yourself....less
bookshelves:
favorites
Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
everyone who's read the rest of the Thursday Next series
I really do love Jasper Fforde's works. I have yet to be dissapointed by his writing style and skill. I thought this was fantastic. It takes place 14 years after "Something Rotten" and so it's rather essential to have read the other books in the series before reading this one, but like the rest of the books by Jasper Fforde, if you just choose this one you probably won't be too lost. He does a great job of summarizing what's come before without giving too much away.
Rather than a sta...more
I really do love Jasper Fforde's works. I have yet to be dissapointed by his writing style and skill. I thought this was fantastic. It takes place 14 years after "Something Rotten" and so it's rather essential to have read the other books in the series before reading this one, but like the rest of the books by Jasper Fforde, if you just choose this one you probably won't be too lost. He does a great job of summarizing what's come before without giving too much away.
Rather than a standard "review" of the book I think that the best thing to say about this book is that it is clear that Jasper Fforde loves the concept of Story. He uses the Thursday Next series to show just how important Story is to the world and to society.
This book also makes a good point in stating that you should try to preserve "The Long Now", which is in part a plot point so I won't spoil it for those who have yet to read, but also just basically means "cherish your life as it is, and don't try to rush around all the time" but said in a less touchy feely way. Also I love the fact that he uses characters to just talk to the audience. Landen's advice to writers seems to be taken from real life. And the last thing I'll say is that I love Fforde's ability to write really silly, really goofy characters and situations that you actually care about. There are a few moments where I actually found myself on the verge of tears, and then laughing out loud just a few pages later.
I love you Jasper Fforde, and when your "Ten Books in Ten Years" thing is done I will be one of the many that will be extremely saddened by the loss of new Jasper Fforde books, even if it's only for a year or two....less
Read in August, 2007
Seriously, Jasper Fforde. This has gone far enough.
I thought The Eyre Affair was pretty ingenious. As the series continued, the books seemed to start to fall into a hole, but as the holder of an English B.A. and M.A., I was sticking with Fforde for his clever puns, literary allusions, Shakespeare references, and other literature-related nonsense. I was particularly fond of The Well of Lost Plots, not because it was terribly good, but as a writer I appreciated the fantasy of Bo...more
Seriously, Jasper Fforde. This has gone far enough.
I thought The Eyre Affair was pretty ingenious. As the series continued, the books seemed to start to fall into a hole, but as the holder of an English B.A. and M.A., I was sticking with Fforde for his clever puns, literary allusions, Shakespeare references, and other literature-related nonsense. I was particularly fond of The Well of Lost Plots, not because it was terribly good, but as a writer I appreciated the fantasy of Bookworld and how stories are created (it's a big machine, people have nothing to do with it, we're "inspired" by what the machine creates, it's complicated). Books two through four were too much, but this was really too much.
Fforde has clearly become so entrenched and obsessed with his fantasy world, he doesn't bother trying to explain anything anymore. If you hadn't read the first four books, you'd be lost on page one. It really seems like a private little joke. All of us could write novel after novel based on our own knowledge and inside jokes. We wouldn't get published, though. Fforde has lucked out, but he isn't at all thinking about his readers anymore. This is sort of ironic, considering how important readers are in this book.
My advice? If you studied English in college or you're sort of a literophile (I made that word up, in the spirt of Fforde), read The Eyre Affair and stop. If you have neither of those things going for you, well, you're lucky, but you shouldn't bother with this series.
...less
bookshelves:
fantasy-sf,
mysteries-thrillers,
reviewed
Read in September, 2007
recommends it for:
fans of the rest of the series
Well, it was certainly wonderful to be back in the world of Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next again. I won't try to summarize the book, you just kind of have to read it, but I will say that this book has just as much twists and turns and humor, and love for books, and nail biting close calls, and things you never could have seen coming as the previous...and what a cliff hanger ending! I hope the next book is out really soon!
I only had 2 picky problems with it. The first was that it took a REALLY...more
Well, it was certainly wonderful to be back in the world of Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next again. I won't try to summarize the book, you just kind of have to read it, but I will say that this book has just as much twists and turns and humor, and love for books, and nail biting close calls, and things you never could have seen coming as the previous...and what a cliff hanger ending! I hope the next book is out really soon!
I only had 2 picky problems with it. The first was that it took a REALLY long time to get going. The first 1/3 of the book is Thursday showing her trainee Bookworld, (actually a way to refresh the readers memory if they hadn't read, or recently reread the past books) but I felt that it went on a little too long, and I started thinking, "okay! Let's get into it now! We're running out of book!" But once the book started rolling, it was a hold-on-tight roller coaster ride, especially the last 1/3!
My other problem with it was that it was a bit repetitive. I swear the pre-chapter info blurbs were recycled from past books: some seemed mighty familiar! Also the descriptions of how HUGE everything was in Bookworld got a little redundant. It even says in the book, something like "since everything was on a large scale in Bookworld, it would be redundant to describe how huge each new thing was"...and then it did a few more times!
Other than my 2 picky problems, it was fantastic to be back in Thursday Next's world, which is so one-of-a-kind, and is just everything that a reader loves to read rolled into one!...less
bookshelves:
fiction
recommends it for:
Thursday Next fans...really not a stand-alone.
Ah, Jasper Fforde. I missed you while you were writing the Nursery Crimes books, in which I just couldn't work up much interest. Thursday is what makes these books work--she's loveably contradictory and hard-assed, but also a doting mum who can't stop calling her son "Sweetpea", even when he's an adult version of himself from the future who's threatening to replace her actual (lazy no-good) teenaged son in the present.
In First Among Sequels, the beginning of a new quartet (...more
Ah, Jasper Fforde. I missed you while you were writing the Nursery Crimes books, in which I just couldn't work up much interest. Thursday is what makes these books work--she's loveably contradictory and hard-assed, but also a doting mum who can't stop calling her son "Sweetpea", even when he's an adult version of himself from the future who's threatening to replace her actual (lazy no-good) teenaged son in the present.
In First Among Sequels, the beginning of a new quartet (featuring a now middle-aged Thursday), our heroine has three (or maybe two?) children and Spec-Ops has been disbanded (or rather forced underground- it operates behind the front of Acme Carpets), and Thursday is sneaking off to the Bookworld without Landon's knowledge. The Council of Genres is mad for interactivity, and Goliath is trying once again to get into fiction for tourism purposes. Can Thursday protect the works of Jane Austen from all the misguided people trying to get in and change them? Meanwhile, the world will end if Friday doesn't join the ChronoGuard...or maybe it will end if he does. Fforde merrily throws new plot threads out there and gets around to finishing some of them, but others he shamelessly leaves for the next book. Fforde's political and cultural commentary is more thinly disguised here than in previous books, but his inventiveness is undiminished. Heck, I'm just happy to get back to the bookworld for an all-to-brief encounter with the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire....less
bookshelves:
fantasy,
mystery
Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
book lovers
Imagine a world where everyone loves books and literary characters have more dedicated fan clubs than rock stars and actors. Thursday Next is a Spec-Ops detective who works for the Literary Division.
In the first book, Jane Eyre is kidnapped by an evil villain and Thursday must enter the book to save her.
Thursday's surreal adventures contine in the next four books and include run-ins with several members of the evil Hades family, the just as evil Goliath corporation, and a variety of...more
Imagine a world where everyone loves books and literary characters have more dedicated fan clubs than rock stars and actors. Thursday Next is a Spec-Ops detective who works for the Literary Division.
In the first book, Jane Eyre is kidnapped by an evil villain and Thursday must enter the book to save her.
Thursday's surreal adventures contine in the next four books and include run-ins with several members of the evil Hades family, the just as evil Goliath corporation, and a variety of fictional and real-life villains. Throw in corrupt Chronoguard members (Spec-Ops 12 members who can travel through time) who eradicate Thursdays father and husband, several imminent end of the world scenarios, and a staggering stupidity surplus and you can see that Thursday has her hands full.
The books:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
I love this series. Fforde's sense of humor is wonderful--no shortage of word play, especially in the names of minor characters. Avid readers will enjoy the literary references. Reading the series is kind of like watching the Simpsons. You can enjoy it just fine on the surface, but if you get all the little inside jokes and cultural references, it's even better. Read them in order. Thursday's word is bizarre and each book builds on the previous one(s).
Highly recommended, especially for fans of Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.
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Read in January, 2008
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is Jasper Fforde’s fifth novel in the Thursday Next series (and the sixth Fforde book I’ve read to date). I was blown away by The Eyre Affair, amazed at Fforde’s creativity and dexterity as a writer.
I still enjoy his writing, but some of the bloom has faded from the Thursday Next series. I don’t know if this is because I have become accustomed to Fforde’s style as a writer or if he has become more complacent with his success.
This is not to say...more
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is Jasper Fforde’s fifth novel in the Thursday Next series (and the sixth Fforde book I’ve read to date). I was blown away by The Eyre Affair, amazed at Fforde’s creativity and dexterity as a writer.
I still enjoy his writing, but some of the bloom has faded from the Thursday Next series. I don’t know if this is because I have become accustomed to Fforde’s style as a writer or if he has become more complacent with his success.
This is not to say that Thursday is not a delightful and well-written book. The novel is likely superior to 99% of other recently published fiction. However, reading the series is like watching a favorite TV show. In time, the episodes simply can’t compare to earlier seasons—yet they still outshine most other series on television (think Veronica Mars season two, House season three, and the current season of The Office).
Fforde is still incredibly creative, and I am flabbergasted by his imagination. For example, the scene where a piano unexpectedly drops into the Bates’ house in Emma, causing all the characters to speculate over its origins, is just plain brilliant.
Thursday Next is still a strong series, and I hope Fforde reflects back on his roots for the sixth installment....less
It's years after the events in Something Rotten and SpecOps has officially been disbanded. Consquently Thursday and many of her former coworkers are working at Acme Carpets, taking care of the strange things that are still going on. But sadly for Thursday and Bradshaw, there are no literary crimes. In fact, nobody seems to be reading anymore. But this does leave time for Thursday to attend to duties in Jurisfiction, and there are plenty of those. She's currently training a cadet, who is a little...more
It's years after the events in Something Rotten and SpecOps has officially been disbanded. Consquently Thursday and many of her former coworkers are working at Acme Carpets, taking care of the strange things that are still going on. But sadly for Thursday and Bradshaw, there are no literary crimes. In fact, nobody seems to be reading anymore. But this does leave time for Thursday to attend to duties in Jurisfiction, and there are plenty of those. She's currently training a cadet, who is a little more earthy-crunchy than Thursday would like, but really it's Thursday's own fault. There's an unnecessary refit of Austen going on. But worse, Sherlock Holmes is missing, presumed dead. And there's been an attempt on the life of Temperence Brennan. In the Outland, Friday is doing his best to be an angsty teenager, even to the point of being a member of a band, and has no interest in joining the ChronoGuard though since he saved Thursday in the past, that's kind of a problem. Felix8 is still running around trying to kill Thursday. Nobody ever seems to see the third Next child, Jenny. Oh, and Thursday hasn't told Landen that she's been working Jurisfiction.[return][return]This carries on the series wonderfully and leaves the perfect cliffhanger for the next book....less
bookshelves:
fiction
Read in May, 2007
I managed to acquire an advanced copy of the book, the 5th in the Thursday Next series.
I love the series, but I think this is the weakest of them. It's not as compulsively can't-put-it-down readable as the rest of the series, and there are way too many apparently disparate plot threads, which, granted, all come together in the end, but make the novel hard to follow early on. It's also not nearly as suspenseful as the earlier novels: none of the conflicts seem all that urgent, there's less d...more
I managed to acquire an advanced copy of the book, the 5th in the Thursday Next series.
I love the series, but I think this is the weakest of them. It's not as compulsively can't-put-it-down readable as the rest of the series, and there are way too many apparently disparate plot threads, which, granted, all come together in the end, but make the novel hard to follow early on. It's also not nearly as suspenseful as the earlier novels: none of the conflicts seem all that urgent, there's less death defying.
One thing this book does have, though, is that, since Thursday has access to every book ever written, she finds herself in her own books (which I'd been wondering about) and there's some good satire of reality TV and government bureaucracy. There's also all the fun wordplay the series is known for. I'm hoping this book is as it seems: a transition. The previous books took place in Fforde's alternate 1980s, and this book takes place in 2002, so we have to establish what Thursday's been up to in the meantime before getting to the action sequences promised by the next novel, where a serial killer (out to kill all of the characters who have their own book series) is on the loose. ...less
Read in December, 2007
After what seemed liked an interminable wait, the most recent installment of the Thursday Next series was finally released. I couldn't wait to read it. It got off to a bit of a slow start and I was worried I was going to be disappointed. O, me little faith! First Among Sequels turns out to be as delightful as the companion books in the series.
Its really hard to try to describe the Thursday Next series (and with a broken wrist at the moment, I can't really type well enough to make the e...more
After what seemed liked an interminable wait, the most recent installment of the Thursday Next series was finally released. I couldn't wait to read it. It got off to a bit of a slow start and I was worried I was going to be disappointed. O, me little faith! First Among Sequels turns out to be as delightful as the companion books in the series.
Its really hard to try to describe the Thursday Next series (and with a broken wrist at the moment, I can't really type well enough to make the effort to attempt it), but I can recommend this book and the whole series to anyone who loves literature and books, is a bit of a grammar-nerd, or who appreciates the subtleties and complexities of the absurd like fine wine. I will sat that if you are interested, but haven't read them yet, go get the first book The Eyre Affair first, then read them in order. Don't jump in to the series with this one.
The slow start and the fact that the 3rd installment in the series remains my favorite so far keep this one from getting 5 starts. Even so, kudos to Jasper Fforde for this "First Amoung Sequals."...less
Read in September, 2007
This is the latest installment in the Thursday Next series, which takes place fourteen years after the previous novel, Something Rotten. Thursday’s toddler, Friday, is now a sullen teenager, and she’s settled into domesticity with her husband Landen… at least on the surface. Of course she’s still doing work for SpecOps and Jurisfiction, which gets her into all kinds of trouble, including encounters with the Book World versions of herself. Fforde invents some clever new plot devices for t...more
This is the latest installment in the Thursday Next series, which takes place fourteen years after the previous novel, Something Rotten. Thursday’s toddler, Friday, is now a sullen teenager, and she’s settled into domesticity with her husband Landen… at least on the surface. Of course she’s still doing work for SpecOps and Jurisfiction, which gets her into all kinds of trouble, including encounters with the Book World versions of herself. Fforde invents some clever new plot devices for this novel; I’m particularly fond of the Stupidity Surplus and the reality-show version of Pride and Prejudice. (You’ll just have to read it to see what I mean). His wordplay is as clever as ever - but I found the plot of this one a little slow, particularly after the fast pace of The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten. It definitely picks up toward the end, but I think this sequel lacks the coherence of its predecessors. It’s well worth reading nonetheless - and believe me, if I hadn’t been starting a new semester while reading this novel, I’m sure I would have finished it more quickly....less
bookshelves:
2007_books
Read in September, 2007
I'm not ready to give up on the Thursday Next books, unlike other reviewers. This book kept me thoroughly entertained on a cross country flight. There are a couple sub-plots that could have stood some more time, but otherwise solid effort. I can see the point that Fforde's use of other book characters, a fun part of earlier books, is almost non-existent in this one. Exceptions are a solid if rarely used troupe of Mrs Danverses and a brief appearance from Temperance Brennan that had to be the ...more
I'm not ready to give up on the Thursday Next books, unlike other reviewers. This book kept me thoroughly entertained on a cross country flight. There are a couple sub-plots that could have stood some more time, but otherwise solid effort. I can see the point that Fforde's use of other book characters, a fun part of earlier books, is almost non-existent in this one. Exceptions are a solid if rarely used troupe of Mrs Danverses and a brief appearance from Temperance Brennan that had to be the result of a FOX kickback (has Fforde ever used a character from contemporary genre fiction like that? if so, shouldn't all the lawyers in the bookworld be from recent pop fiction and not Kafka et al.? I though the Harry Potter bit was more an acknowledgment of his rockstar status in the bookworld then a plug for the books (which certainly don't need one), although it would have made more sense in the falling-reader-rates question than in some off-page discussion of video games). Yeah, so clearly I got involved in this book a little. I like the idea of the bookworld, ok?...less
bookshelves:
read-2007
Read in October, 2007
I loved the previous four Thursday Next books, and so I was super excited when I saw that a new one was coming out - I didn't realize that Fforde has agreed to write four additional books in the Thursday Next series. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed in this one. There were a ton of plot threads that were all laid out very well, but that were only tangentially connected to each other until the very end; for me, that made the narrative seem really disjointed and so I found it hard ...more
I loved the previous four Thursday Next books, and so I was super excited when I saw that a new one was coming out - I didn't realize that Fforde has agreed to write four additional books in the Thursday Next series. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed in this one. There were a ton of plot threads that were all laid out very well, but that were only tangentially connected to each other until the very end; for me, that made the narrative seem really disjointed and so I found it hard to really "get into" the book like I did the previous four. Plus, the only moment of plot not well articulated was the "twist" at the end, which ended up feeling a little gimmicky and a little out of place. Perhaps, as other reviews here on Goodreads have suggested, Fforde's many plot lines are simply setting up the action for the next three, which I will almost certainly read, so there's purpose there, but I still give it 3 stars. And for anyone yet to read a Thursday Next book, I say start at the very beginning with The Eyre Affair....less
Read in February, 2008
This is the fifth installment of the delightful Thursday Next series and I enjoyed it quite as much as others in this series. It is better than The Well of Lost Plots (my least favorite in the series) but perhaps not as mindbending as the earlier novels in its exuberant creativity, mostly because by this time you as the reader have already read 4 of these books and the conglomeration of time travel, alternate futures, and literary fa...more
This is the fifth installment of the delightful Thursday Next series and I enjoyed it quite as much as others in this series. It is better than The Well of Lost Plots (my least favorite in the series) but perhaps not as mindbending as the earlier novels in its exuberant creativity, mostly because by this time you as the reader have already read 4 of these books and the conglomeration of time travel, alternate futures, and literary fantasy is not quite as astonishing. I found this a satisfying, up-to-par next installment of this story and look forward to reading more, given how this particular one ends. These books always make me wish I knew more about literature and history than I do because I often feel like there are even more jokes and funny details than the ones I notice, but that doesn't stop me from highly recommending these to anybody who loves books. And Fforde finally got around to using my particular favorite as a setting, Pride and Prejudice....less
book data (includes all editions)
avg rating
(all editions):
3.93 (1552 ratings)
avg rating
(this edition): 3.97
(30 ratings)
number of reviews: 322
other editions
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First Among Sequels (Thursday Next Book 5)
isbn: 0670038717
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First Among Sequels (Paperback)
isbn: 0340752017
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First Among Sequels: A Thursday Next Novel (Audio CD)
isbn: 142815664X
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