Random moosages as I see fit.

One of Our Thursdays is Missing (Jasper Fforde).  It’s true.  One of the Thursdays is missing.  Oh yeah, spoilers ahead.

So, if you remember from the previous book, which I may or may not have mentioned and I’m too lazy to check if I did now, you have Thursday, the original from the Outland; Thursday1-4, from books 1-4 who ended up being erased after going rogue; and Thursday5, from book 5 who became Thursday1-5 after Thursday1-4 was erased.  Well, one of them is missing, and obviously not Thursday1-4, because she was erased.  Original Thursday is missing and there are shenanigans going on in BookWorld.

• Thursday is missing.
• Racy Novel is being troublesome again.
• Thursday needs to be present at the negotiations with Racy Novel.
• Written Thursday is dispatched to investigate a strange book wreckage.
• She finds that all the ISBN numbers have been scrubbed from the book.
• The Men in Plaid seem to be after written Thursday.
• Written Thursday breaks the law and travels to the Outland.
• Written Thursday impersonates real Thursday.
• A betrayal.
• Jasper Fforde’s own books are somehow rewritten again within his own book.

This one is the last Thursday Next book for awhile.  The next book isn’t due out until sometime next year.

The fifth(?) Thursday Next book!

I’ve mentioned before that Jasper Fforde has a penchant for changing how books are written in our literature stream.  He’s done it with Jane Eyre and Great Expectations for example.  But this time, he’s done it with his own books.  His own!  He managed to change how his own books were written in this book that’s not really the fifth because he managed to unwrite the original fifth book.  That’s talent, right there.

Anyway, First Among Sequels takes place some fourteen years after the last book and we see that Thursday has happily settled down with her husband and her threeish children.  SpecOps is now underground.  Thursday’s duties at Jurisfiction are fulfilled discreetly.  There’s HUGE stupidity surplus in England because they elected a government that had some common sense.  Well, the downside to that is that stupidity, as a commodity, ends up piling up and soon you have this dangerous stockpile of it.  It doesn’t help that stupidity breeds like rabbits too.  So, you have that, along with this atmosphere of blahness that pervades the land, Thursday clones running around in Bookworld, and a Bookworld administration that doesn’t have common sense.  All of this means that the world is coming to an end.  Huzzah!

Also, we herald the return of Aornis and Benevolent Corporation.