Book 81: "First Among Sequels" by Jasper Fforde
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 12:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeThe doorbell rang.
'Ooooh!' said Polly, peering furtively out the window. 'What fun. It looks like a market researcher!'
'Right,' said my mother in a very military tone. 'Let's see how long we can keep him before he runs out screaming. I'll pretend to have mild dementia, and you can complain about your sciatica in German. We'll try to beat our personal Market-Researcher Containment record of two hours and twelve minutes.'
In the fifth Thursday Next novel, set fifteen years after book four, most of SpecOps has been disbanded, so Thursday and some of her former colleagues have set up a floor-coverings company, while continuing their SpecOps work unofficially. Thursday is also running a cheese smuggling operation with her stalker, Millon de Floss, and working as a Jurisfication agent in the Book World, while keeping her husband Landon in the dark about all her unorthodox activities, preferring that he should see her as a wife and mother of three who works as a carpet fitter.
With Aornis Hades jailed in a time loop and Goliath keeping very quiet, everything should be going well, but the inhabitants of Book World are worried because reading rates in the Outland are falling drastically, and the ChronoGuards are panicking because sixteen-year-old Friday Next is refusing to join the ChronoGuards and the secret of time travel still hasn't been invented.
Meanwhile, Thursday is assessing two troublesome Jurisfiction cadets; leather-clad, gun-toting Thursday1-4, protagonist of "The Eyre Affair" and its three sequels, and birkenstock-wearing hippy Thursday5, from the fifth novel "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", which Thursday had insisted should not be full of sex and violence but went too far the other way, and was therefore a lot less popular than the other books in the series.
A very convoluted tale, which I definitely preferred to books three and four, so the title is rather apt.
'Ooooh!' said Polly, peering furtively out the window. 'What fun. It looks like a market researcher!'
'Right,' said my mother in a very military tone. 'Let's see how long we can keep him before he runs out screaming. I'll pretend to have mild dementia, and you can complain about your sciatica in German. We'll try to beat our personal Market-Researcher Containment record of two hours and twelve minutes.'
In the fifth Thursday Next novel, set fifteen years after book four, most of SpecOps has been disbanded, so Thursday and some of her former colleagues have set up a floor-coverings company, while continuing their SpecOps work unofficially. Thursday is also running a cheese smuggling operation with her stalker, Millon de Floss, and working as a Jurisfication agent in the Book World, while keeping her husband Landon in the dark about all her unorthodox activities, preferring that he should see her as a wife and mother of three who works as a carpet fitter.
With Aornis Hades jailed in a time loop and Goliath keeping very quiet, everything should be going well, but the inhabitants of Book World are worried because reading rates in the Outland are falling drastically, and the ChronoGuards are panicking because sixteen-year-old Friday Next is refusing to join the ChronoGuards and the secret of time travel still hasn't been invented.
Meanwhile, Thursday is assessing two troublesome Jurisfiction cadets; leather-clad, gun-toting Thursday1-4, protagonist of "The Eyre Affair" and its three sequels, and birkenstock-wearing hippy Thursday5, from the fifth novel "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", which Thursday had insisted should not be full of sex and violence but went too far the other way, and was therefore a lot less popular than the other books in the series.
A very convoluted tale, which I definitely preferred to books three and four, so the title is rather apt.
