Jasper Fforde

[bjd]

Has anyone here read anything by Jasper Fforde? His books are literary/humour/suspense/absurdity with characters taken out of literature. One of his main heroines is called Thursday Next. I just picked up The Fourth Bear whose back cover says:

The Gingerbreadman -- psychopath, genius, convicted murderer and biscuit -- is loose on the streets of Reading.

But it isn't Jack Spratt's case. Enforced non-involvement looks to be frustrating, until a chance encounter at the oddly familiar Déjà Vu Club leads them into the hunt of missing journalist Henriette 'Goldy' Hatchet, star reporter for The Daily Toad.

The last witensses to see her alive were the Three Bears, comfortably living a life or rural solitude in Andersen's wood. But all is not what it seems. Are the unexplained explosions around the world related to a missing nuclear scientist? How dangerous can cucumber-growing be?

And most important of all: how could the bears' porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time?

I have read several and enjoyed them all. I just found this one on my shelf.

[bjd]

Of course, the typos are all mine.

[bixaorellana]

Oh, I just LOVE Jasper Fforde! The Tuesday Next novels are marvels of inventiveness. One thing I really admire is that within all that cleverness he still manages to have fully-fleshed out characters about whom you care.

To be honest, I'm not nearly as enamored of the nursery series. They make me wish he'd husband his prodigious imagination for more worthy projects, but that might just be me.

I'd recommend that people read the Thursday Next novels in sequence, if possible:
1. The Eyre Affair
2. Lost in a Good Book
3. The Well of Lost Plots
4. Something Rotten
5. First Among Sequels,

[patricklondon]

Me too. I didn't think the nursery series offered as many opportunities for jokes, and seemed a bit tired. But the Tuesday Next series had me in fits (I loved the idea of Baconians going door-to-door like Jehovah's Witnesses, or President George Formby making the national anthem When I'm Cleaning Windows - you probably have to be English and of a certain generation to get that).

I quite enjoy his website too:

www.jasperfforde.com/index2.html

[bjd]

Well, I read the nursery book in no time. It was okay, but I think I prefer the Tuesday Next books as well.

[bjd]

I am blindly following you guys. Her name is Thursday Next.

[bixaorellana]

That's what you get when you deal with mildly confused people from the Tuesday Weld generation.

THIS:                         NOT THIS: