Review: Something Rotten

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde on is the fourth book in the Thursday Next series. If you haven't already read The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots, don't even attempt to start with this one.

In Something Rotten, Thursday Next returns to the real world (well, as reall as it gets in these books) with her son and Hamlet in tow. She learns that bad guy Yorrick Kaine has joined forces with the omnipresent Goliath Corporation to oust the aging English President. As Prime Minister, Kaine wields has used his mysterious influence to pass bizarre laws and stir up hatred of Denmark. Thursday gets her job back at SpecOps to try to defeat Kaine, get her husband Landen back, and try to prevent the end of the world.

It's all very complicated, as I think all the Thursday Next books seem to be, but this one did feel a little more rushed than the first two. But I liked this one more than The Well of Lost Plots (#3).

Buy Something Rotten (a Thursday Next Novel) by Jasper Fforde on Amazon.

Teaser Tuesday: 7/13

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
• Share the title & author, too, so that others can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser!

My teaser today is from Something Rotten (a Thursday Next Novel) by Jasper Fforde. This is way more than two sentences, I know, but this this not the kind of book you can pull two random sentences out of and expect it to make sense. It barely makes sense when you're reading it cover to cover!

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle looked miserable.

"Well, you know there has been much grumbling within Hamlet ever since Rosencrantz and Guildernstern got their own play?"

"Yes?"

"Well, just after you left, Ophelia attempted a coup d'état in Hamlet's absence. She imported a B-6 Hamlet from Lamb's Shakespeare and convinced him to reenact some of the key scenes with a pro-Ophelia bias."

BBAW: How Lenore Made Me A Jasper Fforde fan

Today's BBAW "assignment" was to blog about a book you read only because you discovered it on another book blog. As you can see from the title of this post, it wasn't just one book I discovered from reading Presenting Lenore, but a whole new author.

Almost a year ago (yikes! time flies), Lenore had Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde as her "Waiting on Wednesday" pick. I thought it sounded fascinating and was really disappointed that it wasn't out yet. So I went off to Amazon to see what else this Fforde guy had written. Turns out: a lot. Since then, I've read several of the Thursday Next books and one of the Nursery Crimes books, and have enjoyed them all. The funny thing is, I haven't even read Shades of Grey yet!

The Hunting of the Snark

One of the best things about reading the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde is getting all the inside jokes of literature. So what to do when you haven't read the work being referenced? It depends to a certain extent. I don't think it matters at all to the enjoyment of The Eyre Affair if you've read Dicken's The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, but it would be a problem if you hadn't read Jane Eyre. Still, the books are so much more enjoyable when you get all the references, so I try to look up anything that is clearly going over my head. In the case of The Well of Lost Plots (review), I had no idea who the Bellman was and why he (or she) would be in charge of Jurisfiction. Isn't a bellman the guy who carries your luggage for you at a hotel?

Thanks to Wikipedia, I found the strange and lovely poem by Lewis Carroll that features the Bellman, The Hunting of the Snark.

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."

Read the rest of The Hunting of the Snark at Literature.org.

Review: The Well of Lost Plots

The Well of Lost Plots is Jasper Fforde's third book in the Thursday Next series. In it, Thursday, who is pregnant with her missing husband's child, has moved into Book World to hide out and work as a member of the Jurisfiction police department, under the tutelage of Miss Havisham. None of this will make sense unless you have read the first two books in the series, The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book (see my reviews here).

There's a lot going on in Well, it can be kind of disjointed, and not too much happens to drive the overall story arc of Thursday saving Landen (her husband), forward. (Lenore, of Presenting Lenore, commented on a recent post of mine that this is her least favorite of the Thurday Next books.) I still thought it was a lot of fun, though, and worth reading for any Jasper Fforde fans.

One of the things I liked about it (and this is a little bit of a spoiler, if you are cautious about these things) was that this book is a prequel of sorts for The Big Over Easy (see my review of it here). So for me, reading Well was a little like getting to see a "Making Of" or "Before They Were Stars" special for Over Easy.

Buy The Well of Lost Plots on Amazon

Review: The Big Over Easy

So, here’s a story that doesn’t really have anything to get the book, but I’ll tell it anyway. For whatever reason, growing up we didn’t refer to our eggs as being “over easy.” Instead, we referred to our eggs as being “once over lightly.” When I first moved in with my husband, I kept telling him I wanted my eggs "once over lightly" and he kept looking at me like I was a crazy person. It took me a while to get used to calling my eggs over easy instead.

Anyway...

Meet Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division. He’s investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down, and all those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play.

I wasn’t entirely sure you get much sillier than the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, but he certainly done it with his Nursery Crime series. Someone on Librarything wrote that reading this book was a little bit like watching a Shrek movie and I have to say, I agree. References and allusions go by at a mile a minute. Some of them went right over my head but in general, I caught enough to be amused by the book. The story goes by very quickly which is good, because the plot takes so many twists and turns the book gets rather drawn out. Also, the characters are all very flat - maybe that befits a book based on nursery tales, but it certainly meant that I never really connected on a deeper level with the story. Ford, though, is a great writer and he really knows how to choose his words carefully, making The Big Over Easy very readable and enjoyable.

Buy The Big Over Easy on Amazon.

Review: The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book

I read The Eyre Affair a few weeks ago and recently finished the sequel, Lost in a Good Book, so I thought it might be a good idea to review these together.



The Eyre Affair Amazon description:

Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. … Amidst all this, Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man In the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit [by Charles Dickens] and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that's just a prelude . . .

Hades' real target is the beloved Jane Eyre, and it's not long before he plucks her from the pages of Bronte's novel. Enter Thursday Next. She's the Special Operative's renowned literary detective, and she drives a Porsche. With the help of her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal, Thursday enters the novel to rescue Jane Eyre from this heinous act of literary homicide. It's tricky business, all these interlopers running about Thornfield, and deceptions run rampant as their paths cross with Jane, Rochester, and Miss Fairfax. Can Thursday save Jane Eyre and Bronte's masterpiece? And what of the Crimean War? Will it ever end? And what about those annoying black holes that pop up now and again, sucking things into time-space voids . . .

Lost in a Good Book Amazon description:

The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with Jasper Fforde’s magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside books. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes. And she gains just enough skill to get herself in a real mess entering the pages of Poe’s “The Raven.” What she really wants is to get Landen back. But this latest mission is not without further complications. Along with jumping into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the 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.

Reading the back of the book description for The Eyre Affair did not properly prepare me for reading this book. It is weird. In addition to the dodos, the Prose Portal and time travel, there are also random vampires, terrible (or terribly funny) puns everywhere and a crazy plot. It took me a while to decide what I thought about this book. But you know what? I really liked it. It’s a fun book to read – fast moving, lots of silliness, interesting main characters (though the secondary characters are pretty one dimensional), a satisfying ending. While I’m not sure it’s necessary in order to enjoy The Eyre Affair, I do love Jane Eyre, which added layer to my appreciation of The Eyre Affair.

Lost in a Good Book picks up where The Eyre Affair left off. It is very much a sequel in that I can’t really imagine someone reading Lost in a Good Book without having first read The Eyre Affair. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think this book doesn’t quite stand on its own as well as the first one did. It is also clearly setting up for the next in the series, which annoys me a little. That said, it’s a fun book to read. Miss Havisham (yes, that one, with the musty wedding dress) is a hoot and while I’d never want to spend time with her in person, she’s a fun character.

All in all, I’m thrilled to have discovered a new author to enjoy. Jasper Fforde is a very creative writer and I look forward to reading more from him.

Buy The Eyre Affair on Amazon.
Buy Lost in a Good Book