Text and subtext and textuality and the Council of Genres

After much waiting, the new Thursday Next buy came out a few weeks ago. I went up to Third Place Books with a friend to buy it, then hear Jasper Fforde speak.

The first half of First Among Sequels is just like the previous four TN books: the reader spends most of it going "Huh? What?" until the alternate world is all finally understandable enough to start the action and detective storyline.

In this fifth book of the series, the SpecOps branch where the Literary Detectives work has been disbanded, so Thursday is secretly running it out of a carpet business and secretly funding it by smuggling cheese from Wales. The carpet business is also a front for Thursday to maintain her position at Jurisfiction, the police force within books. Since the real-life Thursday has become so famous she's been written up in books, she gets to encounter the written (and rogue) versions of herself while she's in the book world. Then there's the simultaneous and impending destruction of time travel: her teenage son Friday is supposed to grow up to become a brilliant time-police operative, but as a teenager he's dragging his feet so his future and possible selves come into the present to try and make his save Time.

It's a little weird to explain the Thursday Next series, as the author admitted in his talk at the bookstore. But it's awesome and really nerdy and very meta and highly addictive. And because it's so unique and almost paradoxically simple in its complexity, there's really no accurate way to describe it to folks who haven't read it.

This new one ended in the middle of a storyline, with Thursday realizing there's a killer loose in the book world (a serial killer no less, hahaha --oh how the puns run rampant in Jasper Fforde) . So there's one of the plot lines for the next Next book. It left me hanging but at least not hanging like books 2 and 3, where Thursday's husband's existence is erased and not resolved until book 4. First Among Sequels left some great teasers and nuggets in the dialogue to keep fans hooked on possible future storylines.