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First Among Sequels
First Among Sequels
First Among Sequels
Audiobook12 hours

First Among Sequels

Written by Jasper Fforde

Narrated by Emily Gray

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Jasper Fforde has thrilled readers everywhere with his gloriously outlandish novels in the Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series. And with another genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainmentis Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, Fforde's famous literary detective is once again ready to make the world safe for fiction. Thursday Next is grappling with a host of problems in BookWorld: a recalcitrant new apprentice, the death of Sherlock Holmes, and the inexplicable departure of comedy from the once- hilarious Thomas Hardy novels, to name just a few-all while captaining the ship Moral Dilemma and facing down her most vicious enemy yet: herself. Thursday's zany investigations continue with Our Thursdays is Missing. Look for the five other bestselling Thursday Next novels, including Jasper Fforde's latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 2, 2007
ISBN9781440781544
First Among Sequels
Author

Jasper Fforde

JASPER FFORDE is the critically acclaimed author of Shades of Grey, the Thursday Next series and the Nursery Crime series. After giving up a varied career in the film world, he now lives and writes in Wales and has a passion for aviation.

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Reviews for First Among Sequels

Rating: 4.01063829787234 out of 5 stars
4/5

94 ratings75 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another wonderfully funny addition to the Thursday Next series. Fforde's puns and wit are back with the literary references that make these books so entertaining. This isn't my favorite of the series, but it's definitely worth reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    First Among Sequels is Jasper Fforde's latest installment in his Thursday Next series, and finds that time has moved on a bit - Thursday is now aged 52, has three kids, is happily married to the now-not-erased-from-history Landen, and has retired from both Special Ops and Jurisfiction, content to spend her time running Acme Carpets. Or at least, that's what her family thinks. In reality Thursday is still both doing SpecOps work - hunting down rogue genetic chimaeras and vampires across the landscape of this alternate Britain; and serving as a Literary Agent for Jurisfiction, policing the boundaries between reality and fiction. This is the fifth in the Next series, and to be honest, by this point you pretty much have to be familiar with what has gone on before to hit the ground running. There are a few intertwined plots here, as Thursday struggles to deal with her literary counterpart from the series of novels based on her life; her teenage son who's stroppily refusing to get out of bed and meet his destiny; the return of her ghostly uncle, and over everything, the growing problem of less people reading books in the face of reality TV. Fforde's style is well-established now - bouncing happily from point to point, with literary asides and in-jokes strewn here, there and everywhere.It's all eminently readable, but as with many series of this sort, it's beginning to take on the air of being written on auto-pilot. The prose is comfortable rather than novel, and there are few flashes of brilliance. A good book for reading on a beach.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In this fifth volume in Fforde's series of humor/fantasy/mystery/satire novels featuring Thursday Next, he turns upon himself the same tricks he played on Charlotte Bronte in the first of the series, The Eyre Affair. As always, there are several disparate threads that somehow come together just in time. This time Fforde applies an extra layer of postmodernist self-reference, treating the earlier books in the series as any other book, and positing a fifth book that nobody bought. Other reviews have listed some of the subplots; I'll just say that the reader who isn't, as Thursday prescribes, reading attentively as a creative process, will end up smacking himself repeatedly as he recognizes what JF has been up to.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the fifth of the Thursday Next and a welcome return. I really enjoyed reading this - I think I got distracted during Something Rotten and didn't enjoy it as much as a should have done but reading this makes me think I need to go back and try again.I love the BookWorld - it's a fantastically inventive creation and I think some of my favourite parts of this book was Thursday's descriptions of how that world works. It may not be the point of the book but it reminds me what an amazing process reading is. Makes me think of the Marshall McLuhan quote:"Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?"But it's also a highly entertaining read which also engages emotionally. From the slapstick of the dodo fanciers to the sadness of Milton's goodbye, I look forward to Thursday's return.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    WOW do I love Jasper Fforde's books! I like his Nursery Crime series but my heart belongs to Thursday Next. When I saw that Fforde had written a fifth, my credit card almost melted from the speed with which I purchased it.Not only is Fforde's prose immediately engaging and the premise of these books delightful (The ability to jump into books? Sign me up for that!), but he also involves the reader and his/her literary experience regardless of the level.To be reading a book that mentions not only one of my most beloved children's series (Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson) but also includes a character is just encountered a month ago (Dr. Temperance Brennan of "Bones" fame) - it's like winning a small lottery! He allows the reader to pat him/herself on the back for recognizing many literary references while not making him/her feel ignorant about the hundreds that are probably missed.His commentary on the current state of world affairs is also wonderful...as the Council of Genres discusses reclassifying several classic works - "...Orwell's 1984 is no longer TRULY fiction so has been reallocated to non-fiction." "...Racy Novel gets along with Comedy and Erotica fine, but Ecclesiastical and Feminist don't really think Racy Novel is worthy of a genre at all and often fire salvos of long-winded intellectual dissent across the border, which might do more damage if anyone in Racy Novel could understand them. For its part, Racy Novel sends panty raiding parties into its neighbors, which wasn't welcome in Feminism and even less in Ecclesiastical - or was it the other way around?"Love this one also: "Books suffer wear and tear...For this reason all books have to go into the maintenance bay for a periodic refit, either every thirty years or every million readings, whichever comes first. For those books that suffer a high initial readership but then lose it through boredom or insufficient reader intellect, a partial refit may be in order. Salmon Thrusty's intractable masterpiece The Demonic Couplets has had its first two chapters rebuilt six times, but the rest is relatively unscathed."Throughout the book - Fforde makes his love of books (of the writing process/relationship between author and reader, really) abundantly clear. Thinks Thursday, "Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming time, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all - the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago." Last quote - on poetry: "Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."So combine a love of reading with a good mystery, a world where cheese is an illegal but much desired substance, there is a Toast Advisory board and the issues of the day are a declining read rate, a huge surplus of stupidity and short attention spans seem to be the order of the day...and I'm all in.Can't wait for the next installment!!!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The plot gets a little crowded but his wit is still a pleasure to read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have largely enjoyed the Thursday Next series. They are incredibly creative and intricately plotted. So much so that I can't even begin to try to summarize the general plots of these books. Fforde's imagination is nothing short of amazing and he creates a world that is a bibliophile's delight. However, First Among Sequels is probably my least favorite in the series. The plot is too meandering and unfocused, and nothing really seems to come together until about the last third of the book. You have to read all of these books with careful attention to detail or it's easy to get lost, but this is especially true in this outing. In fact there is one chapter where I wasn't ever totally sure who the narrator was. I would definitely recommend the other books in the series, but it seems that Fforde got sloppy and in too much of a hurry to just get this book done. I would defnitely NOT recommend starting the series by reading this book as I think very little would really make sense to a first time reader. I didn't hate this book. Parts of it were very enjoyable, but overall I was disappointed. I hope for better things in the next book. Fforde set a very high standard for himself in the first several books, and he just wasn't able to deliver to that standard in this story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My recommendation for this book is quite simple: if you've read the previous books in the series and liked them, read this! If you haven't read the books yet, start reading The Eyre Affair soon!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    More madcap surreal adventures in Thursday Next's world.Set in 2002 some 14 years after Something Rotten, Thursday and Landen have been happily living together, Friday is now 16 and hasn't yet joined the Chronoguard - somewhat surprisingly as he was known to have started by 13. Somethign Other is happening with their two daughters. Goliath has only just managed to survive the fiasco of Superhoop and SpecOps has been drastically downsized, however Thursday and the rest of the Swindon crew manage to hold things together. In the bookworld, there is massive concern over falling Outlander reader rates - due in part to the massive social changes intrduced by computer games. There is some great social commentry here, along with sarcastic asides from the CommonSense political party which is still in power. Meanwhile THursday's exploits have been published which means that she also exists as written characters Thursday1-4 and Thursday5. This is planned and succeeds in being very confusing, particularly as the written versions don't quite share the same plot line as the original's we read. This is deliberate, but again confusing, expecially when Thursday has to train Thursday as Jurisfiction cadets.Lots happens, but I felt this was a much slower start than some of the previous works, and while still funny in many places it's lost some of the quirky humour of them too. However the more direct political commentry make sup for someof this. I don't liek time travel stories particularly with odd paradoxes so one of the major plotlines really didn't appeal to me.Overall - good but not brilliant, Fun but not superb. Read the others first, much of the in book references that made them so superb have been replaced with in book references to the previous TN books, which just doens't work quite as well.It is a pre-requisite to have read the previous books. Not much makes sens in any of Fforde's works, but it'll have made even less sense if you don't have the relevant knowledge of th preceding books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The only thing I found squidgy about this volume in the Thursday Next series is the aligning of Thursday's age with what I assume is the dominant reader demographic.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Another very clever and witty Fforde - not one of the easiest reads, though. A bit too cerebral for easy escapism, and too much like the others to keep me going just for the fun of Fforde's wonderful imagination and social comment.Very slow in getting on the way, and I was seriously p.. off by the "cliffhanger" ending.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel is a little slow of the mark, but it picks up the pace rather quickly, which is no surprise with the beloved author. He knows how to spin an incredible yarn and does a fabulous job, as usual. In fact he leaves you hanging by a thread at the nail biting end--you just know that there will be yet another exciting novel in the works--yet not soon enough for your taste. BRAVO, BRAVO!!!!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another fantastic book in this series. I love it. Perfect
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set fourteen years after the last book, we find Thursday running the Acme Carpet company since Spec Ops has been disbanded. Luckily, we soon find that this is a front for underground Spec Ops operations, which itself is a front for Thursday's Jurisfiction work. Good book in the series, leaves a cliffhanger of an ending though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't know whether this was more difficult than the other ones, or that I'm out of practice (I read the others in on swoop) but it took me some time to get into this one, and I did get a bit confused from time to time. Still, a good read, lots of amusing wordplay, and leaves you wanting more. And I have to say that I like the fact that the heroine gets to age and not be young and beautiful. A nice change of pace.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    it was a good enough read but it was just to get you to the next book. that pun at the end, even Fforde shouldn't be able to get away with that!~~
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another great read from Jasper Fforde. I had it signed by the author!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've really enjoyed this bibliophilic series. I think Fforde pulls off bringing Thursday back. As always, I love the subtle (and not so subtle) literary references. The greatest things about this series: it has inspired me to read a great many classic books that I might otherwise have never gotten around to!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    BOOK #22REVIEW: I had know idea this book was coming out and I was overly happy when I saw it sitting on a table at Barnes and Nobel. I couldn't wait to start reading it, and once again, Fforde has done a wonderful job! I loved this book and all the twists and turns (even though at times they seemed a bit deus ex machina- or however it's spelled!) the novel took. I really enjoy how Fforde's imagination just runs and we're taken along for the crazy ride. I love meeting all the fictional characters and jumping in and out of my favorite books. I also like how the more you read the more you get out Fforde's novels. I highly, highly!, recommend this book. (But be sure to read the first ones first!)FAVORITE QUOTES: I'm trying to figure out whether the lack of progress is writer's block, procrastination, idleness or just plain incompetence. // Human's like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms- of life, of love, of knowledge- has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath, and we should be there, too, supporting that one last person. // "Nostalgia used to have a minimum twenty years before it kicked in," he said in all seriousness, "but now it's getting shorter and shorter. By the late eighties, people were doing seventies stuff, but by the mid-nineties the eighties-revival thing was in full swing. It's now 2002, and already people are talking about the nineties- soon nostalgia will catch up with the present and we won't have any need for it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    So I just read the synopsis now and seriously don’t remember anything about Miss Marple in this book. There was a mention of Holmes being found dead early on in his series which is disastrous as far as the canon goes, but I don’t remember a crisis over Miss Marple. Tempe Brennan showed up to tell Thursday someone was trying to kill her though.Overall this was very disjointed by too many plots. First the fact that Thursday must deal with 2 new recruits, both of whom are her fictional selves. One (T5) is sweet, soft and likes puppies, rainbows and natural fiber clothing. The other (T 1-4) is violent, promiscuous and wears black leather. Secondly there is the problem of son Friday not joining the Chrono-guard and fulfilling some sort of destiny and avoiding the end of time. Thirdly is the Goliath Corporation which treats Thursday with the utmost respect now, but there is probably something else afoot. Fourth is a subplot involving Thursday’s lying to Landon about being in Spec-Ops/Juris Fiction. And of course there are the usual details around her memory being screwed with by Aornis, Pickwick’s continued baldness, Dad’s non-existent existence, Mom’s bad cooking, The Minotaur, the asinine behavior of the Council of Genres and some drama involving Racy Novel, Feminist and Ecclesiastical. Oh and the stalking and death of various fictional characters along with a scheme to increase readership which involves reality TV shows and a complete rewriting (destruction) of beloved classics.Overload. Even for these books. The plot threads kept crossing each other, but not enough attention was given to each to make them compelling or even rational. The tone was more and more like a Hitchhiker’s Guide rip off than anything else. I found Thursday 5 to be more annoying than menacing. Of course she’s at the heart of things and keeps things twisty and action-packed. Instead of charming me, the literary allusions just annoyed. Too cutesy and smug by half. And the ending isn’t an ending, it’s a blatant cliff hanger that leaves things unresolved and unsatisfying. I think I’m done with this series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Thursday Next series just keeps getting better. This installation was more cohesive than past volumes even though there were considerable time displacements and jumps between the “real world” and BookWorld.The oddities of this alternative reality version of our world are getting sillier. One example is Thursday’s involvement in underground cheese trading that has her dealing with the Stiltonistas, or cheese mafia. Illegal cheese manufacturing and sales is quite lucrative; especially if you have varieties strong enough to make someone pass out.In this novel, Thursday needs to deal with BookWorld versions of herself. Here Fforde takes the metafictional genre and turns it inward on itself as he references the other works in the Next series and has Thursday working with the characters-including an unflattering version of herself.The main plot line addresses the fate of the Chronoguard and time travel. In true Next novel fashion, the key to saving the guards rests in locating a secret recipe for UNscrambled eggs that her Uncle Maycroft had hidden inside “A Dark and Stormy Night.” The subplot focuses around the decreasing Outland read-rate of books as based on the read-o-meter. To make classic fiction more popular, there is a plan to redo them as reality TV shows. This would lead to the irreversible rewriting of classics like Pride and Prejudice. Thursday needs to overcome a number of obstacles to keep the classics safe.Fforde continues to surprise the reader with his range as he presents a very poignant scene where Thursday suddenly becomes aware that her daughter Jenny is just a figment of her imagination. As the result of a memory worm placed by Aornis, Thursday is doomed to continually realize she doesn’t have a daughter, then forget that she has made that realization. Her family explains that they are aware of the illusion and they “play along” to minimize the mental strain on Thursday. The emotion in portraying this to the reader is that felt by anyone dealing with a mental illness in their family. It was quite touching.What was unusual about this novel is that Fforde appears to have left a stray string. Either he missed ending this plot line or I passed over it in my reading. Was there any closure regarding Sherlock Holmes being found dead in “The Final Problem?”I was afraid the series was closing, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was continued in One of Our Thursdays Is Missing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Maybe it's because I ended up reading it slowly, but this one wasn't quite as outstandingly fantastic as the other books in the series. But even still, it's fantastic and delightful.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The last Thursday Next book wrapped things up so neatly, I wondered if Jasper Fforde was even planning on writing any more books in the series. (And what he would write about, if he did.)In this book, Fforde jumps ahead twelve years to a time when Thursday and Landon have two children (or three, depending on who you ask) and most of the Spec Ops divisions, including literary crime, have been dismantled.The book explores the ideas of self and identity quite a bit, as Thursday encounters two literary versions of herself, as well as two versions of her sixteen-year-old son, one of whom wants to eradicate the other. A good read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't think this book was as good as the previous books in the series. It started pretty slowly,I thought, and it took me a while to get into it. I kept going with it because I've enjoyed all the other books I've read by Jasper Fforde. It did get better, though, and it had me hooked by the end.Maybe it'll grow on me if/when I re-read it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good, but not as good as the previous Thursday Next books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This plot is too complex to summarize. However, when I selected the book, I liked the theme-books about books and investigation crime occuring in bookworld. Fforde has gone way beyond this. There is an array of complex vocabulary to follow this series: Jurisfiction, footnote-a-phones, Literary detective, eraserhead gun's etc. It's all a fun play on words. I really did enjoy this character Thursday Next. This particular novel really develops her character by including 2 other forms. Very complex plot. I may attempt another novel in the series after by brain unravels from this adventure.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Don’t want to spoil the book so I will not go into much detail but one part of this book made me dislike the protagonist its added nothing to the plot and made her seem cold hand heartless. Thats why it gets a 2
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I almost wish Fforde had left the Thursday Next series alone at four books, 'cause they're starting to crumble under the weight of all of this suspension of disbelief, to the detriment of the earlier books. It isn't bad enough that the ideas about time travel and parallel universes are just illogical (see also the new "Star Trek" movie) -- if you go back into the past and change it, then you CAN'T create a new reality, because if you do, then the future you wouldn't have turned out the way it did and therefore wouldn't have been able to go back into the past and change things the way you did. Most of what Fforde's done has been excusable so far, but in this book, he basically negates a large chunk of the best parts of the previous books! This includes the wonderful way he explains the beginning of Earth, as well as the most beautiful way to die, which are probably the most touching and well-written parts of the previous books. Now, it's as if they didn't happen, COULDN'T have happened -- but if they didn't happen, how did Thursday get to this point? They MUST have happened! Grr. Fforde, you disappointed me with this one. I hope you somehow fix it in the next one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the fifth book in the Thursday Next series. The sixth book, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, is scheduled for release in March of 2011. This was a great installment in this series. It started out a bit slower than previous books, but ended up being very engaging. It does end on a cliffhanger though, which previous books haven't done. I listened to this on audio book and the audio book was extremely well done. I have really been enjoying listening to this series even more than reading it.This book starts 14 years after the events that take place in Something Rotten. Thursday and Landon have been happily married and have three children; Tuesday, Friday, and Jenny. Thursday is still doing Spec Ops work but works a carpeting job as cover. She is also still doing Jurisfiction work but using Spec Ops as a cover for that. The nation has a huge stupidity surplus because of good government that's been in place too long and someone keeps trying to kill Thursday...again. On top of all of this Thursday's son, Friday, has not developed into the time traveling genius he should have and as a result time travel may not have ever been invented causing the unraveling of time as we know it. As usual with these books the plot is a complex jumble of seemingly random occurrences that all tie nicely together. I had been hoping to learn more about Thursday's time traveling son Friday, and was happy to be able to do that in this book. This book is just as witty, crazy, and well tied together as the previous ones. And although Thursday is much older, she is just as much fun to be around. It was nice to see how she juggled having teenagers with all her other craziness.Thursday's children are all a delight to finally meet. Tuesday is a mathematical genius and Friday is a lazy guitar planning stereotype. Her husband Landon is as wonderful as ever.All the above being said while I really liked this book, there were a couple things that made me like it a bit less than the previous ones. It starts out kind of slow. At the beginning I was worried, it seemed like maybe with age Thursday had lost some speed and the plot slowed with her. This was a temporary problem and as the book continued it picked up. I also did not like all the lying. Throughout the book Thursday is constantly lying to Landon and that drove me crazy! How could they have a workable relationship with all of this lying? It was all resolved well in the end though.Speaking of the end...this book ends on a total cliffhanger and very abruptly. Basically in the last few pages of the book Fforde starts a completely new story line and then stops in the middle of it, so that was a bit of a bother too.Overall a great installment in the Thursday Next series. Starts a bit slow and all the lying Thursday does to Landon drove me crazy. But the writing was creative, crazy, and witty like normal and things picked up in the end. This book does end on a cliffhanger though, so I am dying to see what happens in One of Our Thursdays is Missing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love these books though I have to say I consider it the weakest of the series. Still, if you like the Thursday next series, you will want to read this book.It takes place 14 years after Something Rotten and most of the SO branches have been disbanded. Thursday has several events to contend with. One is the possible end of time which seems to be dependent on whether or not her son Friday joins the ChronoGuard. The other is the decline of reading and the rise of reality TV shows and its effect in bookworld. She also has to contend with two bookworld version of herselfFor the first time, I think, Fforde introduces a contemporary fiction character who will probably figure in the next book. It is forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. He also includes some situations that could be linked to current political situations.A great read. Recommended.