Becky's T-Blog

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Hard cheese

I'm a big fan of the Thursday Next series of books by Jasper Fforde. Set in an alternate Britain in which supernatural happenings and Heath Robinson technologies are commonplace, they feature Thursday, a "literary detective" who gains the ability to travel within books.

It would all be rather twee if the "Book World" wasn't so imaginatively realised, and the stories so densely plotted. It's all quite grown up and clever, basically if you like Gaiman, Pratchett and Adams you'll probably like these.

In the England that Thursday Next inhabits, cheese is a prohibited substance, and highly desirable. Thursday has a side-line as a fencer of illegal cheese from Wales, which (in the books) is a separate and unfriendly country to England.

It therefore amused me yesterday when I discovered there's an actual drug called "cheese"! No doubt Jasper Fforde wasn't aware of this when he chose cheese as a drug-like contraband item in his books, but it seems a odd example of life imitating art.

Stephanie Delacey Cheese eh? Next you'll be warning us of the dangers of "cake" :-p Doesn't affect Shatner's Bassoon, does it?

Lara Tyg Ripping Yarns ?

Becky Yep Steph, my sense of time is totally off! :-)

Lara...sorry, you've lost me. :-)

Natalie I love these books! And every time I try and explain them to people I get funny faces. The other fun thing about Fforde is that all of his novels are so literary. You can go back and read them again after some heavy hitting on the classics and you pick up fifty new puns in every chapter. The more well read you are, the more you like them.

Lara Tyg Ah sorry , Becky , I thought the Ripping Yarns were well known.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/rippingyarns/index.shtml

Just wondering if they were the same kind of boys own adventures, set in an age of empire feeling.
Obviously not quite as silly though.

Becky Heheh, I'd heard of Ripping Yarns but no, not really the same Lara. Natalie probably summed it up best... hard to explain without getting funny faces!

Pandora Caitiff I really enjoyed The Eyre Affair. I'm now looking for something new to read so I'm going to try and find Lost in a Good Book tomorrow when I pop into the city

Lynn Jones Mr Fforde's other sideline - with DCI Jack Spratt and his assistant Miss Mary Mary - aren't half bad either (IMO).

The odd thing about the last book is that it does stand up as a murder-mystery as well as having all those lovely Ffordisms.

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