Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

"Thursday5 looked thoughtful. 'The readers are everything, aren't they?'
'Now you've got it,' I replied. 'Everything.'"

Although a part of me does wish that the first book I have been able to actually finish since last November was something with gravitas, some weighty tome that has caused many an English grad student to stay up late smoking cigarettes, there is a great rightness to the fact that what I actually read instead was the newest installment of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. I am not sure whether Fforde qualifies as a guilty pleasure or not, but there is something deeply satisfying about his goofily charming books, and I have read, I confess, every one. I can't imagine that anyone who loved books wouldn't love the Next novels, except for the most curmudgeonly intellectuals: say, Harold Bloom. But the rest of us feel like we are part of the coolest inside joke in literature: Next is a kind of FBI agent that is able to leap between the Outland (the real world) and the Bookworld in order to do everything from veto wrong-headed bills passed by the Council of Genres (like turning classic books into interactive reality tv shows) to fighting threats to fiction (falling reading rates, serial killers, errant Minotaurs, piano shortages, etc.). This book, like any true-to-formula series, keeps our beloved heroine, but also multiplies her times five, her other selves representing the protagonists of the previous novels. (Metafiction doesn't even begin to cover it, trust me.) and adds new characters, namely Thursday's children. And for all their dweeby puns and screwball plot twists, the books are also gratifying meditations on literature, on pop culture's distortion of our leisure time, and, perhaps most fun, the vitality (literally) of the classics. This, probably, is why it is the book I picked up first after many months of detoxing from reading (caused by the poison of reading hundreds of bad student papers): it reminds me of the sheer joy that reading affords.