Big Ed's Place

Jasper Fforde’s sixth Thursday Next novel, One of our Thursdays is Missing, recently came out in hardback. He’s one of the few authors I still buy hardback books for, sight unseen. While his other series are interesting, his forte is really the Thursday Next novels.

First, they’re not erotica, and they have no real sex in them. They’re a warped modern silly world that involves how books are created, which is why I feel I can justify reviewing them here. Basically, they’re good, they spend a lot of time musing about the business of writing and the creative process, and they’re fun.

Thursday Next’s universe can charitably be described as an alternate reality where time travel exists, as do the paranormal, dodos, cheese smuggling, Richard the III performances conducted like Rocky Horror, and Croquet being the national sport of England. The craziness is reminiscent of Douglas Adams, but is far more accessible and less strange for the sole purpose of being strange.

Thursday Next, the name of the narrator and lead character, discovers in the first novel, The Eyre Affair, that she can leap into books. There, the characters hide backstage until they are being read, at which point they strut on stage and say their lines. Of course, the ability to move between the fictional world and the real world is of significant interest to some villains and the Goliath Corporation–the multinational of evil that invokes Milo Minderbender and Catch-22. Fortunately, Thursday Next is a war veteran (from The Charge of the Light Brigade), a decent investigator, and a heck of an adventuring heroine.

In the following novels, Thursday Next becomes one of the top agents in Jurisfiction–the book world police. They’re responsible for making sure that the characters follow the stories laid out for them by the authors, as well as keeping elements from one novel from creeping into another. Failure can mean something like “that lighthearted cooking farce” Titus Andronicus turns into something completely different. We also learn how much control authors really have over their characters and storylines, as plot features and scenery details are bargained and traded in The Well of Lost Plots, and actors are trained to become lead characters or consigned to side parts.

The sixth novel, One of our Thursdays in Missing, goes meta. The narrator isn’t the original Thursday Next, but her fictional alter ego, from the book written about Thursday Next. She has to investigate the original’s disappearance, cope with actors in her book who aren’t interested in following their lines, and deal with the possibility of being less read (which leads to the characters’ destruction unless they can find another book).

The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel

is available from The Tattered Cover in paperback. It’s the first book in the series.

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

is also available from Tattered Cover in hardback. It’s the most recent book in the series.

(Why The Tattered Cover? See my post here).

So my family passes books around. Sometimes they’re recommended, and sometimes they’re just “are you interested?”

That’s how I got an action thriller from my mother, The Secret of Excalibur, by Andy McDermott. She said it was “too James Bondy” but might be good as an airplane book for me. So I started it on the recent airplane ride and it was… bad. I couldn’t believe how bad.

Furthermore, it was obvious my opinion was in the minority. The book is the third in a series, and there’s at least a fourth, according the the back cover. It’s published by Bantam Books, which is a Random House division, and was originally a hardback release instead of straight to paperback. Additionally, the cover has glowing blurbs from major UK magazines.

But I don’t think my opinion is wrong, so I figured I’d provide a full critique, particularly of the plot elements. Perhaps that’ll be of interest to readers here, in ‘what not to do.’ Or maybe it’ll just be quietly infuriating to realize that this got published when so many works without these problems do not. Obviously, I’ll have to reveal spoilers, so the whole negative review is behind the cut…

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I surrender. The Japanese are kinkier than us Americans. I thought I’d seen a lot in the bdsm community, but I had no idea until I’d read Pink Box Inside Japan’s Sex Clubs, by Joan Sinclair. This thick journalistic-style photo album pushes the curtains aside and strides right into Japan’s Red Light industry. Covering hostess clubs, nude theaters, soaplands, …

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Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, is beautiful, thought provoking, and a bit disturbing. A very thick graphic novel, it’s not cheap nor, surprisingly, a quick read.  The basic premise is that Wendy (of Peter Pan), Alice (of Wonderland fame), and Dorothy (of the Wizard of Oz) all stay at the same hotel in Europe in 1914.  It doesn’t take long for their paths to cross and then… things go through the metaphorical looking glass. read more »

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, is accurately subtitled “Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” I picked it up as a writing guide, and found it far more interesting as a window into Anne’s life and her own approach to writing.  That said, much of the advice is quite good… read more »

Bonk, a non-fiction book by Mary Roach subtitled The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, wanders through the history of research into the physiology of sex. It’s written for a general audience, translating the scientific elements into easy to understand descriptions, but also including a good bibliography for those wishing to learn more…

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