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    Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel
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    Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel
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    Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel

    Written by Jasper Fforde

    Narrated by Emily Gray

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The second 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


    The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with New York Times bestselling author 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 the BookWorld. 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. It's another genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment for fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse. Thursday's zany investigations continue with The Well of Lost Plots. 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!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 8, 2011
    ISBN9781101432396
    Unavailable
    Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel
    Author

    Jasper Fforde

    Jasper Fforde is the internationally best-selling author of the Chronicles of Kazam, the Thursday Next mysteries, and the Nursery Crime books. He lives in Wales. www.jasperfforde.com Twitter: @jasperfforde Instagram: @jasperfforde  

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    Reviews for Lost in a Good Book

    4/5

    119 ratings114 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I liked this book so much more than the first in the series and I am happy I decided to continue on and read book #2.Fforde is a funny guy and the story was witty and a bit saucy. This book was a great escapist read.
    • 4/5
      Thursday Next goes on press tours, experiences a higher-than-expected number of coincidences, gets recruited into Jurisfiction, and is blackmailed by the Goliath Corporation, all while managing morning sickness.Hijinks! Adventure! Bad literary puns! What more could you want...
    • 5/5
      This series is such a fun and literary jolt I need between other books!
    • 5/5
      This author creates interesting worlds and characters.This is the third book I've listened to by this author.
    • 4/5
      Another gleefully clever literary/alternate-universe romp from Jasper Fforde. Perhaps it's because - as the second in a series - it no longer has the element of surprise, but I somehow felt it was a little less tight and controlled than the first one, and somewhat distracted by its own dazzling display of quirky firecrackers. Full review coming soon.
    • 4/5
      “Lost in a good book” is the second part of the adventures of Thursday Next, known from "The Eyre Affair".

      After the "minor adjustments" in “Jane Eyre” Thursday is a celebrity and the bosses insists on her to improve the image of Ops. Therefore, she bumps into determined PR-specialist time after time. Worse is that Goliath insists on releasing their agent from "The Raven" and will do everything to persuade Thursday into cooperation. As if that were not enough, someone is trying to kill her by ... coincidences. And of course she must save the world from a strange pink substance.

      To sum up, lots of things happen. We meet more characters from the literature. And the story is full of unexpected twists. You definitely can’t deny Fforde the imagination and creativity.
    • 4/5
      I really love the Thursday Next series and this book was now exception. The book has it all: strong female characters, interesting plot twists, and excellent world building. It's funny and entertaining and I'm already on to the sequel.
    • 4/5
      I almost gave up - but by Chapter 4, I was hooked! Still, the cleverness can be cloying.
    • 4/5
      Great story, very complicated. Just like "The Eyre Affair", it took some time before I really got into it. It's great that the world around Thursday is again a little bit more developed. I had real trouble to put it down towards the end. It ends with a great cliffhanger for "The well of lost plots".
    • 4/5
      Probably even better than Eyre. Landon was boring, anyway.
    • 4/5
      Thursday Next is back and she's raring to save the literary world once again. With Goliath on her back, the SpecOps either trying to get her to do PR work or arrest her for information, and a bizarre sequence of coincidences seeming to be trying to kill her, it's hard to believe that Thursday's life could get any worse. Having find out her husband has been eradicated, Thursday is determined to find a way to get him back. Can Thursday find a way to keep her life away from danger or is it always bound to follow her?I found this book to be better than the first, not that much better but still better. The humour throughout is bound to keep you constantly laughing.I love Bowden Cable, Thursday's work partner, he just seems like such an awkward but weirdly funny guy. I even loved the Schitt brothers. Just the sight of their names made me giggle out loud - Jack Schitt and Brik Schitt-Hawse. I'm still a huge fan of Thursdays and was still rooting for her to succeed. I felt sorry for her when she discovered that her husband had been eradicated and there was little chance of her getting him back. Her time travelling dad played an amazing role in this book, always there to save his beloved daughter from trouble. Their relationship was definitely something sweet and loving. I did find Cordelia Flakk rather irritating. I could quite happily have slapped her - repeatedly.The mysterious A.H.. Acheron's dead, so it can't possible be him, right? That was a brilliantly played out mystery - finding out who A.H. was. I was shocked at finding out who it was. Thursday has finally learnt how to jump in and out of books - she even accesses her own memories and has conversations with them. That was interesting, especially now that's she's the apprentice of Miss. Haversham, who is determined to show young Thursday the ropes.I'd say compared to the first this was more of a page turner. You felt more connected with the characters, you wanted to know more about what was going to happen to them.I loved the scene where Thursday desperate for some extra cash so that she can pay her rent and keep her pet dodo, Pickwick, joins Spike on an adventure to recapture a S.E.B aka Supreme Evil Being. Spike is a character and a half and all of his excursions with Thursday always end up fast paced and full of action. He's loveable and harmless but with a job not many people would want to have.I'm hoping the series just gets a bit better every time. It'd be a shame if we start going backwards and they become more like "The Eyre Affair" or worse.
    • 5/5
      Diese und weitere Rezensionen findet ihr auf meinem Blog Anima Libri - Buchseele

      Und noch ein geniales Buch von Jasper Fforde. Bereits das erste Buch, Der Fall Jane Eyre, hat mich voll und ganz begeistert. Vor allem die Dodos haben es mir angetan und natürlich die Spezialagentin Thursday Next.

      Schon der erste Band war genial und, ganz getreu der Redensart, dass Genie und Wahnsinn eng beieinander liegen, irgendwie auch ganz schön wahnsinnig und ein kleines bisschen abstrus. Und dem steht „In einem anderen Buch“ in nichts nach.

      Die Geschichte ist voller seltsamer Handlungsirrungen und -wirrungen, denen man zugegebenermaßen manchmal nur schwer folgen kann, und voller noch seltsamerer Charaktere, von denen man die meisten irgendwie kennt, wenn auch ganz anders, nämlich aus ihren Originalromanen, in die ThursdayNext hier eintaucht und aus denen die Charaktere hin und wieder auch mal abhauen.

      Dabei ist der Schreibstil des Autors deutlich geprägt von einem, in meinen Augen absolut herrlichem, Humor, der manchmal durchaus etwas schwarz und trocken ist. Dabei strotzt das Buch nicht nur so von inter-literarischen Verweisen, Wortspielen und Andeutungen sondern weist auch immer wieder subtile Pop-Kultur-Anspielungen auf, die einem beim ersten Lesen oft gar nicht wirklich auffallen.

      Genau wie der erste Band ist auch „In einem anderen Buch“ ein komplexes Meisterwerk literarischen Irrsinns, dass sich nur jedem Literatur-Fan empfehlen lässt und auf jeden Fall mehrfach gelesen werden sollte.
    • 4/5
      Thursday Next is back for her second adventure in literature. Fforde does a good job of merging science fiction, fantasy, and literary references into a uniquely imagined 1985 London landscape. In addition to her pet dodo, Pickwick, Thursday also interacts with Neanderthals and goes on an outing to witness the mammoth migration. Then there’s the newly discovered long-lost Shakespeare play, Goliath corporation’s need to retrieve their senior executive from Poe’s The Raven (see the first book in the series), and Thursday’s father’s warning that the world will end on Dec 12th unless he can figure out how to stop it turning into pink goo. Oh, and did I mention that Thursday’s husband Landen has been eradicated and she has only her memories of him to warm her dreams? I am completely entertained and intrigued by Fforde’s highly imaginative books. My only complaint is that this one clearly ends with a cliff hanger, setting the reader up for a sequel. That’s the kind of literary manipulation that drives me crazy. The author should have faith that he’s developed characters and a story line that are so engaging that readers will want to come back, not try to force them to return by leaving Pauline tied to the tracks with a train approaching. (And for the younger set: that’s a reference to the old serials that used to play before the main feature at the movies, enticing the audience to return next week to see how Pauline got saved - only to leave her in a barrel about to go over a waterfall next week. Google “Perils of Pauline.”)I listened to the audio book, performed by Elizabeth Sastre. She does a great job, in my opinion. Her pacing is good … not too fast and not interminably slow. And she’s able to use different voices to help differentiate the characters.
    • 4/5
      A smart sassy heroine who really knows how to keep the story straight!
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed the first of the Thursday Next books, so I picked this one up.This one I didn't enjoy so much, mostly because it all seems to be set-up with no pay-off. I suspect we'll be seeing more of the Jurisfiction squad in the next one, which I will be getting because the book is still fun, even if it's not particularly satisfying.
    • 4/5
      Thursday Next goes on press tours, experiences a higher-than-expected number of coincidences, gets recruited into Jurisfiction, and is blackmailed by the Goliath Corporation, all while managing morning sickness.Hijinks! Adventure! Bad literary puns! What more could you want...
    • 4/5
      Book number two in the Thursday Next series. After making several dangerous enemies in book one, Thursday has to be constantly on her guard. From coincidence convergences to chronuption she has her work cut out. Not only is she a literary detective, she's recruited as a Jurisfiction officer too and spends her time hopping in and out of books and the ultimate library. Fun fantasy with a heart. Can't wait for the next instalment.
    • 3/5
      Lost in A Good Book
      The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde

      These are #s 2 & 3 in the Thursday Next series (following "The Eyre Affair.")
      I was in the mood for some fast, humorous reading, so these suited me quite well this week. Half alternate-world scifi, half detective novels, Fforde writes comedy for those of a literary bent. However, one doesn't really need to have read all the classics he refers to in the books to enjoy the story - you'll just get more of the jokes if you have.

      In "Lost in a Good Book," SpecOps agent Thursday Next is riding high after her success in solving "The Eyre Affair" - but the evil corporation Goliath is after her, her beloved and newly-married husband has been eradicated through a time-travel plot, and it seems that the villain Hades may not be completely eliminated after all... but worst of all, it seems that all life on earth may be doomed to turn into pink goo... next week.
      Can Thursday save herself, her husband, and the entire world?

      "The Well of Lost Plots" follows the story directly. In order to escape the chaos of her world, Thursday decides to take a break in the book world - inside a peaceful, unpublished, bad detective novel. But, part of the deal is that she has to become a JurisFiction agent. Apprenticed to the feisty, speed-demon driver Miss Havisham (yes, from Dickens), Thursday discovers that the book world may be just as dangerous as her own. And what is up with the soon to be released new platform for literature - UltraWord?

      In these books, Fforde really fleshes out and complexifies his worlds - both Thursday's alternate England and the BookWorld. They aren't, perhaps, as focused or "complete" (in and of themselves) as the first installment, but there's more here for everyone. Tons of fun details.
    • 4/5
      "Confused is exactly how all cadets to Jurisfiction should enter their first assignment!" -- Miss Havisham to Thursday Next in Lost in a Good Book

      Last summer, I dipped my toe into the weird waters of Jasper Fforde's chronicles of Thursday Next, voyager through fiction, literary detective, time traveler's daughter and hard-working civil servant in an alternate universe in which literature is taken way, way more seriously than it is in our own. And it took me a while to recover from all the crazy-cool insanity packed into that flawed but fun novel, The Eyre Affair, the experience of reading which was like hanging out with a precocious teenager who felt the relentless need to keep impressing one with his precocity every two minutes or so. Nice kid, don't want to discourage him or hurt his feelings, but dude!

      Keep reading, my Fforde-loving friends encouraged. The series gets better.

      My Fforde-loving friends were right, though we still have kind of a hot mess on our hands in this second installment.

      There is time travel, and the consequences thereof -- a storyline involving the "eradication" not only of Thursday's husband, who was not rescued from drowning when he was two years old, but also of Thursday's father, who was never conceived. Yeah, like that. There is more bewildering fiction-delving of a kind that knocks the plot of The Eyre Affair into a cocked hat -- Thursday is still a LiteraTec operative, but has also, as part of her effort to un-eradicate her husband (by whom she is pregnant, even though he doesn't exist), been inducted into the corps of "Jurisfiction", a band of fictional characters who police literature to keep it from getting tampered with; Thursday is apprenticed to Miss Havisham (of Great Expectations fame, rotting wedding dress and all)* and gets sucked into Havisham's endless and bitter rivalry with the Red Queen. Yeah, like that. And, in one of the silliest and most clever scenes I've yet seen Fforde pull off, Thursday's disciplinary hearing into her conduct within the text of Jane Eyre during The Eyre Affair that saved the novel from oblivion but gave it a happier ending (that happier ending being the one we know as canonical) is conducted by the Magistrate from Franz Kafka's The Trial. Yeah, it's like that.

      Oh, and there's the little matter of impending doom; in December, 1985, something is going to happen that turns all organic life on planet Earth into pink slime. This is kind of Thursday's problem, too.

      That's a lot of narrative pins to keep juggling, but Fforde does pull it off**. I would have liked it all just a little better without the extra layer of unnecessary faux supplementation he added to each chapter, though; Frank Herbert/Dune-style, he "quotes" from various fictional sources that do not really give the reader much in the way of additional insight and do, sometimes, telegraph events and appearances that would have been more enjoyable as surprises in the novel text. This crutch is a lot less annoying than the narrative-voice gaffes I found so annoyingly distracting in The Eyre Affair, but it's still something I fervently hope Fforde outgrows as he gains confidence in his ability to tell, and his readers' ability to follow, these richly complex and rewarding stories. As it was, about halfway through the book I simply started to ignore them, and yes, the second half of the book seemed much more enjoyable.

      And since this was already a very enjoyable book, that's really saying something. Thursday's world(s) is/are charmingly daffy, teeming with hilariously dastardly villains, madcap old ladies who drive like bats out of hell and intimidate landlords with walking sticks and icy stares, inter-species relations with a small tribe of cloned Neandrathals who have a richly nuanced culture all their own but were sequenced to be incapable of reproducing, office politics and the uniquely troubling difficulties faced by a young woman suddenly thrust into the public eye and also pregnant by a man who never existed. It's heady stuff, and great fun, and I'm in for the long haul with this series.

      Thursday? Next!

      *Which, get ready for Havisham, who all but steals the novel. As Fforde portrays her extra-novelar (yes I just made that up) life, she reminds me a lot of Diana Trent in the amazing Britcom Waiting For God. If there is ever a film of these, I demand Havisham be played by Stephanie Cole. So, hurry up, film world, if you're gonna. Cole isn't getting any younger.

      **Well, mostly. One of the denouements winds up relying on a pretty lame idea that somehow fictional characters can't follow back-and-forth dialogue without dialogue tagging, but I guess I can forgive that. Or at least, I can try.
    • 3/5
      ‘Bad boy!’ she added in a scolding tone. The Tasmanian tiger looked crestfallen, sat on its blanket by the Aga and stared down at its paws. ‘Rescue Thylacine,’ explained my mother. ‘Used to be a lab animal. He smoked forty a day until his escape. It’s costing me a fortune in nicotine patches. Isn’t it, DH-82?’

      This is such a clever book and there ere are so many quotable passages, but the problem is that may favourite parts contain spoilers of either this book or of pretty much any classic work of literature worth reading.

      I really admire the level of detail and research that Fforde put into this book, but I didn't think it lived up to the enjoyment of the first book, The Eyre Affair, tho. Maybe the novelty of Thursday's world has worn off a bit already, maybe the incessant puns and jokes were just a bit too much.

      However, Thursday is still one of the best protagonists out there - kickass and kind.

      The only real problem I have with this book is that it was so obviously written with the idea to continue the story in book #3 and therefore doesn't even attempt to be a standalone story - which makes me feel somewhat cheated and tricked into having to get the next book to find out what happened to my favourite characters.

      I NEED TO KNOW THAT THE EGG IS OK!

      Seriously, not cool, Mr. Fforde. But I guess, now I know how Scott's or Dickens' readers must have felt when they had to wait for the next installments of their stories.

      And, yeah, I obviously am still in denial that Harry Potter worked the same way - except that I wanted to read the other books for their own sake, not to find out what happened to one particular character.

      Ugh.

      (Changed my mind about the rating and going to go with 3*, not 3.5*.)
    • 4/5
      I had so much fun reading this book. It is not great literature, but I find it difficult to resist a book in which Miss Havisham (yes, that Miss Havisham) drives a car while berating a book detective who is investigating an alternate reality.
    • 1/5
      I found the first book in the series underwhelming, but I thought I'd give the second one a chance, figuring that this one wouldn't get bogged down in world-building like the first did. Too much of the first third of this book seems to be taken up with rehashing the events of the previous book, and it feels like Fforde's stabs at humor haven't really improved. I could bore you with describing every strained attempt at wackiness or over-explained joke, but having recently re-read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have to say Fforde just has no bite. Considering that the Thursday Next books are aimed at book nerds, the whole idea of taking shots at giant corporations, bureaucracy, celebrity culture and fashion just feel like lazy pandering. Sorry, Jas, this is where you and I part ways.
    • 4/5
      I actually enjoyed Lost In A Good Book more than I enjoyed The Eyre Affair. Partly, I think it was that the ideas weren't so new and I already had some kind of attachment to the characters. And there was more bookjumping, which as a concept that fascinates me -- it was done slightly differently in the Inkworld books by Cornelia Funke, but it's still similar. There's a lot of that going round, actually: Jasper Fforde's books, Inkworld, the Inkheart movie, the Disney Bedtime Stories film... Perhaps it indicates a bigger interest in escapism nowadays? Anyway, that's beside the point.

      The plot is more interesting in this book, I think. There's stopping the end of the world, there's rescuing Thursday's husband from being eradicated, there's the Jurisfiction stuff. There's another one dimensional evil-for-the-sake-of-evil character, but she's not got as big a part in this book as Acheron Hades did in the first. Besides, her power is amusing.

      The back of the book says "Douglas Adams would be proud". I kind of agree -- some elements of the book remind me of his stuff, anyway. Maybe not as good, though. Still an enjoyable read.
    • 5/5
      I've read the first three of the Thursday Next series now, and I happen to think that this one, Lost in a Good Book, is the best so far. Thursday Next finds herself in impossible scrapes both in the real world and the book world, scrapes that are completely plausible once Fforde gets done crafting them. This was the crazy, off the wall, weird, completely original book I was looking for in the first book of the series, and this is the one that has cemented my determination to finish every one of the Thursday Next novels. If you're looking for something mind-blowingly imaginative and insanely creative, Lost in a Good Book is for you. You'll need to read book 1, The Eyre Affair, to get everything that's going on in this one, but it's definitely worth the effort. Go on, try it. You'll like it.
    • 4/5
      Second book in the adventures of Thursday Next. Having fixed the ending to Jane Eyre, Thursday is ready to rest with her new husband, Landen Parke-Laine. But Landen is eradicated by Goliath Corporation, and in her attempts to rescue him, she finds she must go into The Raven and bring back Jack Schitt, who she had trapped in there. Promises are made and broken, and she finds herself apprenticed to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations in order to become a Prose Resource Operative for Jurisfiction (the police force inside books). Totally complicated and convoluted, but I love Fforde's imagination, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars

      Thursday Next is happily married, pregnant, still working as a Literary Detective in SO-17 and the toast of the town of Swindon for her work in the case of The Eyre Affair. But all is not cookies and cream for long. Landen is eradicated by Goliath Corporation to blackmail Thursday into retrieving one of their employees incarcerated in Poe's The Raven. And as if that's not enough, her rogue chronoguard father warns Thursday the world will be consumed in pink gooey slime in a few days. Pickwick, her pet dodo, joins her in motherhood by laying an egg, much to the surprise of her owners who mistakenly assumed she was a he.

      A confusing mystery from the alternate reality that Thursday Next operates in. Even she gets pulled dimensionally, becoming a Jurisfiction apprentice to Ms. Havisham of Great Expectations fame.

      I enjoyed the puns, play on words and occasional witty humor. It's a fun read, if a bit confusing at times trying to keep track of the alternate history and mystery.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyable, but not as good as the first book. You definitely should read the first book before starting this.
    • 4/5
      Literary detective Thursday Next is back again. She's become a minor celebrity after the successful conclusion of The Eyre Affair. However, not everyone is a fan. She made some enemies in the course of her work, including the powerful Goliath Corporation. Thursday is troubled by a series of coincidences. Then her husband, Landon, is eradicated by the chronoguard. To get Landon back, Thursday must find a way into a copy of Poe's Raven, but without the help of her Uncle Mycroft's prose portal. Fortunately, Thursday is introduced to the world of Jurisfiction, where she is mentored by Miss Havisham to become a Prose Resource Operative. Most importantly, she learns to book jump without the aid of the prose portal.I didn't have quite the same sense of delight on my second visit to Thursday Next's alternate England. I guess you get used to pet dodos, Crimean War veterans, airship travel, and time travel. The real treat this time was Elizabeth Sastre's reading, which didn't seem like reading at all since Thursday tells her own story. Sastre completely buys into Thursday's world, making it easy for the listener to do the same. The Thursday Next books are playful and imaginative, full of puns and literary allusions. Start at the beginning with The Eyre Affair since each book builds on the events of the previous book in the series.
    • 5/5
      Thursday Next is back and dealing with a plate overflowing with unlikely problems. With her husband eradicated from reality by the Goliath Corporation, a newly discovered lost Shakespeare play, and an apprenticeship in Jurisfiction (the police force within books) with Miss Havisham, Thursday has her hands full. Nevermind that someone is also trying to kill her with coincidences and she needs to figure out why the world is going to turn into pink goo in just a few days.Liking these books is a no-brainer for me. Weird alternative reality, plenty of literary references, time travel, and quirky characters make them a delight from start to finish. I will definitely be picking up the next book in this series much sooner than I got around to this one.
    • 3/5
      Not as enjoyable to me as "The Eyre Affair," this sequel has enough plot threads for a carpet, which confused me on occasion. Fforde's playful sense of humor carries the day, but I hope he doesn't rely on so many tricks in the next volume.