The Well of Lost Plots

From Goodreads: The third installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England
Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment. After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful BookWorld literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like the one she has taken up residence in—are scrapped for salvage. To make matters worse, a murderer is stalking the personnel of Jurisfiction and it’s up to Thursday to save the day. A brilliant feat of literary showmanship filled with wit, fantasy, and effervescent originality, this Ffordian tour de force will appeal to fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse. Thursday’s zany investigations continue with Something Rotten. Look for the five other bestselling Thursday Next novels, including One of Our Thursdays is Missing and Jasper Fforde’s latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!

Thoughts: What better place to retreat to to lick your wounds and ponder your next step than a book. In this series, you can do that quite literally. The third book in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series sees Thursday joining the BookWorld police force, Jurisfiction and moving into a unlikely to ever be published book for a little down time.

Like it's predecessors,  The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots is funny, easy to read and full of wonderful ideas and thoughts. You can find yourself twisted around a bit and trying to work out which way is up at times, but Fforde usually unravels it for you at some stage. 

In fact, I think there are hidden depths to Fforde's books. There is a lot in there for a book group to discuss. In this the idea of there being no original ideas left is one that has been discussed in literary circles before. Are there any original ideas? Do we need them? How are they generated? What happens to all the ideas that never actually become books?

I'm enjoying this series and will keep reading it but I feel there is great benefit is spacing them out. In this case, I think too much of a Fforde thing could be a challenging thing!

The Well of Lost Plots gets 3 stars!

 *        Did not like it
**       It was OK
***      Liked it
****    Really liked it
*****   It was amazing

Book Review: Lost in A Good Book

From Goodreads: The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with Jasper Fforde's magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction, the police force inside books. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes. And she gains just enough skill to get herself in a real mess entering the pages of Poe's "The Raven." What she really wants is to get Landen back. But this latest mission is not without further complications. Along with jumping into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter's The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth.

Thoughts: I think Fforde is my new go to fun author. What this man does with literature is hilarious. I mean really, who would have thought that Miss Havisham is a speed freak??
This is one of those books that's hard to review without giving too much away. Needless to say if you are one of those who has lived your life wishing you could literally get lost in a book - this series may be for you. Thursday Next's life is beyond chaotic. Her husband has disappeared - worse he's been eradicated so no one except her even remember he ever existed, the Goliath Corporation are after her as is the public relations manager for SpecOps.
This is a series you need to read from the beginning, but I highly recommend it. It all starts with The Eyre Affair (Jane Eyre will never be the same again). I'm highly interested to check out his Nursery Crime series as well.

Book Review: The Eyre Affair

From Goodreads: Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

Thoughts: You know when you have heard of an author, yet you've not read one of their books, despite several people telling you to? Until a week ago, that was me and Jasper Fforde. And I now wonder why I waited so long!
I loved this - I loved that it wasn't predictable, that it made me twist my brain in ways it doesn't normally go. For me the writing wasn't smooth, but that was part of the appeal. The characters are unpredictable,  unstable and just plain hilarious at times. I love that it's almost impossible to put it into a genre - is it sci-fi, literary, historical, political, romance, time travel, comedy - reality is it's a bit of all that. The true reality is that reality in this book is very, very twisted!
The reviews of this on Goodreads are vary - there are those who love it and those who despise it. I can see why it would be so polarising and easily admit it's not for all. You don't have to have read Jane Eyre to enjoy the Eyre Affair, but it would certainly help. You don't have to have a basic understanding of literature, but again, it would help. You do need to have a twisted sense of humour and a willingness to let go of all you think you know about the world.  As far as I am concerned, it's well worth a go.