{"id":2595,"date":"2005-01-25T15:59:46","date_gmt":"2005-01-25T20:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/01\/25\/2595.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:32","slug":"book-report-the-well-of-lost-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/01\/25\/book-report-the-well-of-lost-p\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Well of Lost Plots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next<\/a> series, and finally read the third, The Well of Lost Plots<\/a><\/I>. It’s good.\n

For those Gentle Readers who don’t know about ’em, Thursday Next begins as a perfectly ordinary SpecOps officer, dealing with literature-related crimes in a world where the Crimean War never ended, books are closer to the cultural core than television, and people are named things like Thursday Next. Eventually, she winds up in the BookWorld, interacting with fictional characters both in their own books and in their free time, and takes up another law enforcement role in Jurisfiction. This book takes a lot of time mucking around in the actual mechanism by which stories are transferred to the reader via the author and the BOOK technology, due for a big upgrade. As a result, Ms. Next spends a lot of time in the titular Well, in a book that hasn’t been written and probably won’t be.\n

Don’t start with the third one, not only because there is a sort of story arc over the books, but because it’s not as good as the first two. There is a lot of funny stuff, but the first book has all the fun of showing us the world before heading into Jane Eyre<\/i>, and the second has the fun of introducing us to Jurisfiction. The third introduces us to the mechanics of it, which aren’t actually much fun, and doesn’t make up for it in much of any way.\n

Well, except that, you see, they’re gearing up for the big upgrade, and there are a lot of loose ends to clear up, including the whole “that that” and “had had” business. Since those usages are confusing and distracting, in theory a book has to apply to the Genre Council for approval to use them, although over time not only had their standard for approval been inconsistent, effort put into enforcement had been inconsistent. Now, with the upgrade coming, they have to find out whether a particular “that that” that appears in the book is OK or not, and say things like “David Copperfield<\/I>, unlike Pilgrim's Progress<\/I>, which had had had<\/I>, had had had had<\/I>. Had had had<\/I> had TGC's approval?” Not often anybody gets to use that one in context, even if they have to build a whole damned book of context around it.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying Jasper Fforde\u2019s Thursday Next series, and finally read the third, The Well of Lost Plots. It\u2019s good. For those Gentle Readers who don\u2019t know about \u2019em, Thursday Next begins as a perfectly ordinary SpecOps…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17281,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions\/17281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}