Next Thursday Next

Today’s post might look/sound a bit artificial… because of some not so great mood of mine, but my blogging is regular. Isn’t it? Long-story-short-version is that I was an asshole for some few days and it peaked and backfired. Now I learned (am learning) a lesson and will be less of an asshole in future.  

As a child, I had been lucky enough to have heard a few stories told by my dad (rare event). If he were a writer, he would have turned out to be a fantasy/fiction fellow. Because, in his stories, there would be cats hailing taxies driven by rabbits and stuff like that. He being inherently a funny person, his on-the-fly-made stories used to be funny too.

The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde should be in the same genre. Pretty amazing stuff. I read two books of the series and really liked them. The rest are in the pipeline. But now in a small break (sigh).

The protagonist is a lady – which in itself is nice. The narration is in first person – again, I mostly like that (remember “To Kill a Mocking Bird”?). And the story is unbelievable, yet amazing. Imaginable, yet incredibly rare kind of imagination.

The heroine goes into the world inside books and interacts with the characters in there. The characters come out to the real world and interact with people here. There is time travel, singularities and all such fantastic stuff.

And the topping – it IS funny. But it assumes the reader to be aware of lot of stuff. I cannot recollect the details now, but I remember reading a small conversation from the book and then laughing out loud. Then I realised that no one would even understand the joke if he/she hasn’t read some other book.

So you see? you need to have some general-literary-knowledge to thoroughly enjoy it. (Not that it is non-enjoyable otherwise). And I don’t claim that I have loads of it. I might have missed out some nice stuff owing to my ignorance. :(

I would recommend it to the ones who’d like to read some good books.

BTW, After writing here about reading/improving German, I didn’t really put efforts in that direction. Now, I am heading to the city to buy one book – “Das Parfum” – suggested by a couple of expatriates in Munich.

Signing off, Sands.

Additional:

A small thing which I forgot about the books is that, the author wrote his first book at the age of 40. So… I still can hope. :) (I remember about an author who had his first novel at the age of 54. Coincidence – even that was told by my dad!)