First Among Sequels (Thursday Next, Book 5) Paperback – July 29, 2008

This series is one of those unfortunate ones that is so, SO good that I want to pass them along to everyone I meet (I buy every used copy of the first one I can find, to give them away!), but when you try and tell people what the books are all about, you get blank stares - it all just sounds too odd.This latest in the series is no exception - clever, laugh out loud funny, and so fantastic that explaining it just doesn't do it justice. The literary humor is still hilarious (and explained well enough that those who haven't read the classics that the jokes come from can still get the jokes!) and Thursday's personal life and literary adventures are both well-written and enjoyable.I had found the last Thursday book, Something Rotten, a bit duller than the first three, and so was delighted to begin reading and see how good this one is. Fforde is back on form!Thursday's grumpy teenage son Friday, who speaks in teenage grunts, is destined sometime in the future to save humanity from extinction some 700 times, but right now is causing his parents to tear their hair out over his stereotypical teen behavior - sleeping late, listening to loud music, and being monumentally lazy.Thursday has a new apprentice, Thursday Five, who comes from one of Thursday's poorer selling books in which the author substituted her usual crime-solving and bacon-sandwich eating demeanor for one of a yoga-doing, lentil-eating peacenik who tries to set unruly and murderous literature-dwellers down for a nice cup of tea to talk things over.What will become of the lowered reading rates, and the government's dangerous surplus of stupidity, which must, somehow, be discharged? Will the Goliath Corporation, up to its old tricks, succeed in killing Thursday? Read this latest and find out.

Wow, weird. Clever author and fantastic, funny, satirical plot. The only down side is that I thought this was the first in the series. Wonder how I got that idea? Anyway, so now I have to decide if I want to read the preceding books. It was fun, but I had trouble finishing. Lost my interest. Maybe I'll try another of his books in the future. Undecided.

This is the first one of the five novels that I have read in hardback, so it's been a couple of years since I read that last one. By the time I had finished the series of the already published, I was hooked on Fforde's ultra-Ffunny mode of writing about literary classics through the adventures of the Literary Detective Thursday Next, whose penchant for traveling in and out of fictional works is well-known in the fictional world, if not the real world, up until now. For anyone who thinks that life is too short to be serious and who has dabbled in the classics, Fforde is a God-send. He combines the logical clarity of Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, and Bach), the humor of Douglas Adams (Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and the satiric swipes at modern culture of G. K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday ).There is another plus which any writer or wannabe writer of fiction will quickly recognize: Fforde is constantly describing the structure of fiction: how the author creates a real world out of words. As Thursday walks around and interacts with fictional worlds, we become aware of the limits of the fictional world, such as the few kinds of trees in the forest, maybe only a handful, since only those trees exist which the author has chosen to describe. We learn how much fuller the Outland (the real world) is compared to the BookWorld of fiction....In Chapter 32, Thursday goes off roving in a Jane Austen novel using a vehicle that is appropriately called an Austen Rover. She was introduced to the Rover by a Doctor Anne Wirthlass, who explained all the complexities of the Austen Rover. Soon Fforde introduces some physics into his novel, this time in form of BookWorld "dark reading matter", an obvious swipe at the so-called dark matter which fills the Outland Universe. Obviously Phforde is haphing phun with physics again.[page 282] "The Nothing is a big place," I said without fear of understatement, "and mostly empty. Theoretical storyologists have calculated that the readable BookWorld makes up only twenty-two percent of visible reading matter -- the remainder is the unobservable remnants of long-lot books, forgotten oral traditions and ideas still locked in writers' head. We call it 'dark reading matter'."Can our heroine ever recover her rightful place as Landen's wife and mother to two real children and one imaginary one? Will Friday become half the ChronoGuard agent that his grandfather was? Will Landen ever finish his great British novel? Will Jenny ever come down from her camp in the attic? Will Aornis ever get to pay for her stockings at T. J. Maxx? Will the stupidity surplus be discharged by building the Anti-Smite Shield? Will Felix8 ever get out of the Weirdshitorium? Will Fforde ever run out of things to poke Ffun at? All we can say in parting is: What Next?The remainder of my review can be found in DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#07c by Bobby Matherne.

I LOVE the intellectual humor that is throughout the entire series. Very funny.

I appreciated the book-related humor, and the plot was clever and fun. This is the sort of book I enjoy for a change of pace, but I don't think I'd want to read several books in the series.

A lot of excellent puns and imagery.Too much equivocating distracted from the story.