{"id":209,"date":"2003-04-16T22:31:42","date_gmt":"2003-04-17T02:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=209"},"modified":"2003-04-16T22:31:42","modified_gmt":"2003-04-17T02:31:42","slug":"fforde_jasper_0_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2003\/04\/fforde_jasper_0_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Fforde, Jasper: (02) Lost in a Good Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> <\/a> <\/p>\n

Lost in a Good Book<\/cite>, Jasper Fforde’s sequel to The Eyre Affair<\/cite><\/a><\/strong>, is a very silly book. Really very silly.<\/p>\n

I was not that impressed with The Eyre Affair<\/cite>, frankly; it had some inspired bits, but I was never that involved in the story. For whatever reason, I enjoyed Lost in a Good Book<\/cite> far more. Maybe Thursday is a more interesting narrator to me when she starts out happy; maybe my expectations were more finely-tuned; maybe it’s just that I’m not recovering from taking the bar. Also, I was warned that it was not a fully self-contained story, so the ending didn’t bother me.<\/p>\n

(I read the end yesterday, eating lunch outside on a beautiful sunny 80-degree day. Under those conditions, it would be hard to upset me anyway.)<\/p>\n

Quite a lot of it doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but there are so many lovely little touches that I don’t really care. For instance, at a meeting of Jurisfiction, which polices literature from the inside, on the agenda is:<\/p>\n

\n

“Item three: Interloper in the Sherlock Holmes series by the name of Mycroft—turns up quite unexpectedly in The Greek Interpreter<\/cite> and claims to be his brother. Anyone know anything about this?”<\/p>\n

I shrank lower, hoping that no one would have enough knowledge of my world to know we were related. Sly old Fox! So he had<\/em> rebuilt the Prose Portal. I covered my mouth to hide a smile.<\/p>\n

“No?” went on the Bellman. “Well, Sherlock seems to think he is<\/em> his brother, and so far there is no harm done . . . “<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks Mycroft Holmes shows up out of nowhere.<\/p>\n

And then there’s:<\/p>\n

\n

“Thursday, that’s not possible!”<\/p>\n

“Anything<\/em> is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement.”<\/p>\n

“We’re in a what<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

“We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.”<\/p>\n

“Ah! One of those<\/em>.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As I said, it is a silly book. I look forward to the next one considerably more than I looked forward to this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde’s sequel to The Eyre Affair, is a very silly book. Really very silly. I was not that impressed with The Eyre Affair, frankly; it had some inspired bits, but I was never that involved in the story. For whatever reason, I enjoyed Lost in a Good Book far … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fforde, Jasper: (02) Lost in a Good Book”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15,25],"tags":[210],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-thursday-next","tag-fforde-jasper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}