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primeidealThis is the first book in the Thursday Next series (shoutouts to atamascolily for raving about its weird meta-ness some time back in the day and putting it on my radar, I do occasionally remember these things even if I'm not commenting at the time!). The setting is an extremely silly alternate-history England in which the Charge of the Light Brigade happened in the 1970s, people travel by airship, anti-Stratfordians are the annoying proselytizers, and everyone has punny names like "Jack Schitt" and "Paige Turner." Thursday Next is an agent in the LiteraTec department of SpecOps, an organization which also encompasses werewolf and time travel malfeasance. (It's not often I see a book in which time travel subplots exist but aren't fundamental to the main plot!)
Like early-career Pratchett, Fforde isn't necessarily interested in delivering a cutting satire of RL (beyond the fact that the military-industrial complex is bad) so much as vibes-based fun on the level of individual sentences. Thursday's uncle, Mycroft, invents absurd gadgets:
The early chapters have a little too much of "Thursday gets pulled in to a new office to meet a new group of people who we might or might not actually care about several chapters from now, her chief qualification is knowing the antagonist from her university days." The villain, Acheron Hades, specializes in doing things For The Evulz, which is fine in a humorous book, but it makes his later teamup with the greedy military-industrial complex people hard to fathom--what is he getting out of it?
Each chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph, which again, can be fun but in this case is sometimes used as a way to fast-forward through interesting parts. (The last chapter, at least, has a shout-out to British change ringers ringing bells for special occasions, so there's that.)
Part of Thursday's personal life involves reconnecting with an old flame from her hometown. When we learn more about their relationship and the events of the century-long Crimean War that drove them apart, I can understand why Thursday broke up with him and why he believes he was in the right. The "discovery" that causes Thursday to change her mind, however, and the ensuing plot contrivances that mean they can't immediately reconcile, felt cheap. (But the very last twist in how things resolve, which is not entirely due to Thursday's efforts, is clever.)
Important context: I have not actually read Jane Eyre. The good news is, neither has Thursday's colleague Bowden, which provides an excuse for her to infodump the plot to him. Even more importantly, their universe's "Jane Eyre" is not quite our universe's Jane Eyre--the concept of "our world is just somebody else's AU" is usually a fun one, and how things resolve is very fun, especially for what it says about literature scholars' versus ordinary people's assessment of Good Art. (Again, it's not clear why the bad guy is trying to take the fictional construct of Jane Eyre hostage, given his "being evil is more fun than making money" attitude--wouldn't he rather just torment her for kicks and giggles?)
Along the lines of Wayside School, there is no chapter 13. Also, while this is probably a lot more appealing to English nerds than math nerds, you'll probably be more amused if you know about perfect numbers. ;)
Bingo: First in a Series, Dreams, borderline romance? [Edit December 2024: it turns out that Reddit is doing a readalong of the whole series so I can also count it for that too!]
atamascolily for raving about its weird meta-ness some time back in the day and putting it on my radar, I do occasionally remember these things even if I'm not commenting at the time!). The setting is an extremely silly alternate-history England in which the Charge of the Light Brigade happened in the 1970s, people travel by airship, anti-Stratfordians are the annoying proselytizers, and everyone has punny names like "Jack Schitt" and "Paige Turner." Thursday Next is an agent in the LiteraTec department of SpecOps, an organization which also encompasses werewolf and time travel malfeasance. (It's not often I see a book in which time travel subplots exist but aren't fundamental to the main plot!)Like early-career Pratchett, Fforde isn't necessarily interested in delivering a cutting satire of RL (beyond the fact that the military-industrial complex is bad) so much as vibes-based fun on the level of individual sentences. Thursday's uncle, Mycroft, invents absurd gadgets:
I was staring at a whole host of brightly colored fish all swimming in front of my closed eyes. They were on about a five-second loop; every now and then they jumped back to their starting place and repeated their action...
"I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!--you're back in the real world again."
...
"I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm's small body. I call them HyperBookworms. I think you'll agree that it's a remarkable achievement."
...
As for the worm's waste products, these are chiefly composed of apostrophes--something that is becoming a problem--I saw a notice yesterday that read Cauliflower's, three shilling's each...
(Christian Bök approves!)"I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!--you're back in the real world again."
...
"I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm's small body. I call them HyperBookworms. I think you'll agree that it's a remarkable achievement."
...
As for the worm's waste products, these are chiefly composed of apostrophes--something that is becoming a problem--I saw a notice yesterday that read Cauliflower's, three shilling's each...
The early chapters have a little too much of "Thursday gets pulled in to a new office to meet a new group of people who we might or might not actually care about several chapters from now, her chief qualification is knowing the antagonist from her university days." The villain, Acheron Hades, specializes in doing things For The Evulz, which is fine in a humorous book, but it makes his later teamup with the greedy military-industrial complex people hard to fathom--what is he getting out of it?
Each chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph, which again, can be fun but in this case is sometimes used as a way to fast-forward through interesting parts. (The last chapter, at least, has a shout-out to British change ringers ringing bells for special occasions, so there's that.)
Part of Thursday's personal life involves reconnecting with an old flame from her hometown. When we learn more about their relationship and the events of the century-long Crimean War that drove them apart, I can understand why Thursday broke up with him and why he believes he was in the right. The "discovery" that causes Thursday to change her mind, however, and the ensuing plot contrivances that mean they can't immediately reconcile, felt cheap. (But the very last twist in how things resolve, which is not entirely due to Thursday's efforts, is clever.)
Important context: I have not actually read Jane Eyre. The good news is, neither has Thursday's colleague Bowden, which provides an excuse for her to infodump the plot to him. Even more importantly, their universe's "Jane Eyre" is not quite our universe's Jane Eyre--the concept of "our world is just somebody else's AU" is usually a fun one, and how things resolve is very fun, especially for what it says about literature scholars' versus ordinary people's assessment of Good Art. (Again, it's not clear why the bad guy is trying to take the fictional construct of Jane Eyre hostage, given his "being evil is more fun than making money" attitude--wouldn't he rather just torment her for kicks and giggles?)
Along the lines of Wayside School, there is no chapter 13. Also, while this is probably a lot more appealing to English nerds than math nerds, you'll probably be more amused if you know about perfect numbers. ;)
Bingo: First in a Series, Dreams, borderline romance? [Edit December 2024: it turns out that Reddit is doing a readalong of the whole series so I can also count it for that too!]
