The Well of Lost Plots
Just finished “The Well of Lost Plots,” the third of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. I really love these books. They’re full of the sort of geeky, literary humor that makes me laugh out loud and feel smug at the same time. Well of Lost Plots is no exception: it’s got an anger management counselling session with the characters of Wuthering Heights, several outbreaks of the mispeling vyrus, and the villain from The Squire of High Potternews (say it out loud a few times…if that doesn’t work, think Pythagoras).
This book deals with Thursday Next’s apprenticeship with Jurisfiction, the police force of the book world. They’re responsible for investigating all sorts of literary crime: characters who are trying to change their stories, infestations of grammasites, the plot device black market, and the theft of all the punctuation from the last chapter of Ulysses. Miss Havisham and the Cheshire Cat are back along with several new characters, both from real books and from made up ones. Fforde’s conception of the Book World, which sometimes seemed a bit vague in the first two books, is now fully formed and wonderfully inventive. Unfortunately, this book isn’t as tightly plotted as the previous ones, so it sometimes seems like there’s not much holding all the puns and literary references together. It gets going at the end, but I wanted a bit more of a story to keep it all moving. Still, none of that is going to keep me from going out and getting the next one, Something Rotten.
