Thursday Next: First Among Sequels -- Jasper Fforde

Thursday has retired from Specs-Ops (actually, her division was downsized) and Jurisfiction to spend her life with Landon and to raise their three kids.  He's still writing, and she's working as a carpet layer.

Except of course, she's not.  The carpet company is just a front for Spec-Ops, and she's still very much a part of Jurisfiction.  She just hasn't raised the courage to tell Landon... for the last fourteen years.

England has Big Problems due to a stupidity surplus, the Book World has Big Problems due to falling read rates, and Thursday has Big Problems with her slacker son, Friday.  Actually, the whole world has a Big Problem with her slacker son Friday -- he was supposed to have joined the ChronoGuard years ago, and if he doesn't soon, all of time will roll up on itself and disappear.

Sherlock Holmes, Lucy Pevensie, Thomas Hardy, and Cold Comfort Farm all get mentions, while Temperance Brennan and the cast of Pride and Prejudice have brief cameos. 

Sadly, I fell asleep twice while reading this.  As I've said before, Fforde's strength (for me, anyway) is in what he does with characters invented by other people -- I don't tend to find his own characters particularly interesting.  This book was pretty much all about Thursday and her issues, not so much about Thursday in the BookWorld. 

That isn't to say that there's No Funny at all -- there were plenty of one-liners and slightly-longer-than-one-liners:

The MAWk-15H virus has once again resurfaced in Dickens, particularly in the death of Little Nell, which is now so uncomfortably saccharine that even our own dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell complained.

...there just seemed to be far less than in the past.

His other strength is in his ideas.  But while I think that he has great ideas (the Danverclones were inspired (though they didn't get much play), I especially like how the BookWorld works, with its red-tape and politics, and I love-loved the idea of conflict between genres), I enjoy thinking about the ideas much more than actually reading the books.

I'm thinking this might be the last one for me.  Because as much as I like the ideas behind the books, I don't really enjoy reading them.  Sad.