Lost in a Good Book - bookrastinating.com

Paperback

English language

Published April 2, 2002 by Hodder & Stoughton.

ISBN:: 978-0-340-82467-2
OCLC Number:: 441651614

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 …

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.

4 editions

jonn reviewed Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next, #2)

Five coincidences, seven Irma Cohens and one confused Neanderthal

4 stars

There are like three story lines and one of them is a bit unnecessary.

I liked the story less than the Eyre Affair, but it's an absolute banger.

There is significantly less thought-provoking constructs in the book than in Douglas Adams books, but there's one quote which stung quite a bit with how applicable it is to the country I live in:

Sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off.

Fforde really loves Adams, by the way:

Sample viewing figures for major TV networks in …

There are like three story lines and one of them is a bit unnecessary.

I liked the story less than the Eyre Affair, but it's an absolute banger.

There is significantly less thought-provoking constructs in the book than in Douglas Adams books, but there's one quote which stung quite a bit with how applicable it is to the country I live in:

Sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off.

Fforde really loves Adams, by the way:

Sample viewing figures for major TV networks in England, September 1985 Owl Vision

Will Marlowe or Kit Shakespeare? (literary quiz show) 13,591,203 One More Chance to See! (reverse extinction show) 2,321,820

Great book, I think one in the series will be a masterpiece. A ton of potential!