Recently Read - January 4th 2007

Here's a list of the books I've read recently, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

• Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde
  
• The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde
  
• Something Rotten - Jasper Fforde

  Three more of the Thursday Next, literary detective novels. For the first two of these, although they are well written, have some good original ideas (for example, the parody of DRM in The Well of Lost Plots), and it's fun to try to work out all the literary character references, I was getting a tad jaded towards the end of The Well of Lost Plots.

  For a start, neither of these two comes to a conclusion. Admittedly there are other authors who do this, but it's not something that makes me want to rush out and buy the rest of the books in the series, unless I know it has reached an end.

  On a side note, it would be great to see some of the UltraBook(TM) ideas come to fruition in the RealWorld(TM).

  There were parts that were very funny though. I was giggling like a little schoolgirl all the way through the that that had had scene. The fact that that piece had had such an effect on me is not really surprising. Apologies to anybody trying to parse that last sentence, who doesn't have English as their first language (or to anybody who does, for that matter).

  But Fforde really makes up for it in the fourth book, which is the best in this series by far. Thursday is mostly back in the Real World, fighting Yorrick Kaine and the evil monopolistic Goliath corporation. I actually had a tear in my eye for the last few pages, as all the great plot ideas are nicely tied up.

  I see at the back of this last book, that it says to look for the next Thursday Next novel in 2005. This didn't happen, and the next Next, First Among Sequels, is scheduled for July 2007. Hopefully he's taken the extra time to make the new one just as good.

• The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

  One of the books that defined the tough guy Private Eye genre. I read it in the Pocket Books paperback edition, and it just goes to show you should never judge a book by its cover.

  The film is also a masterpiece, sixty years on.

• The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach - Prof. Peter Schickle

  See another recent post for more information on P.D.Q. Bach. The version I recently read was from 1976, when Prof. Peter Schickle had only been playing P.D.Q. for a few years. Not a white hair in sight.

• Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut
  
• Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut

  Two Vonnegut books that have been sitting on my "to read" shelves for several years. The first is a good collection of his short stories, including the unforgetable Harrison Bergeron. If you've never read any Vonnegut, spend a few minutes and try that one.

  The second is a novel, which is a satire based on the fallout from the Nixon Watergate affair. To quote the book description on the Amazon web site:

  "Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government...and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentary as Watergate's least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times."

  Definitely cutting 25 years ago but even now, it's not totally blunt.

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( Jan 04 2007, 08:10:04 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]