TN4: I enjoyed it less than the first three -- it was a 'helicopter', a lot of unrelated parts moving in synchrony, that yet somehow seem to get the story from point A to point B. However, we get a few answers! (Of course, it would be a spoiler to give them all away. But, gingham? Really?) It has a lot to recommend it to the literophile, especially fans of the Revernd Dodgson (I really hope I spelled his name correctly. Oh, wait -- I'm on the Internet!

The fate of the world depends on the results of the Superhoop, with help from the cloned Neanderthals wholly owned by Goliath Corporation, now a religion after a year of bad press. Thursday Next is back in the real world after hiding out in the world of unpublished novels. Jasper Fforde books are wonderfully crazy .

Happy birthday, William Shakespeare, and as a gift for your 450th, I present to you an excellent book written for your 440th. Jasper Fforde has exactly the same love of reading and writer's inventiveness as many of the great ones who are inspired by your creativity. Not only does he give Hamlet some thoughtful reflection upon his role as a dithering protagonist, but also literally brings you back to life with all the tragic consequences of your great plays. Okay, not even King Lear suggests an a...

So here come some of the main ingredients of this part of the series of inimitable inter genre reading cocktails:Propaganda, manipulation, and warmongering in politics and trade: the satirizing of all the conspiracy theories and real-life events in this regard play a key role in the series, as it´s often the evil corporation that is playing with the next attempt of real-world domination, literary world submission, or just mega sales of a new product, not caring about the potential causality, tim...

Jasper Fforde has easily made his way into my favourite authors list. He is smart, witty, inventive, and packs his Thursday Next series full of literary references. He's basically a book lovers dream. The only terrible thing about reading one of his books is knowing it has to end. This one was definitely one of my favourites. Fforde seems to have had a vision of the future because I could swear he based his villain character Yorrick Kaine on Trump. Thursday is, as usual, a magnificent heroine an...

Have you started the Thursday Next series yet? If not, put the first book The Eyre Affair on your short list. This is one of my favorite series and Something Rotten is easily the best book in the series thus far.How can a book this hilarious make me weep like a heartbroken teenager at the end? I laughed, I cried - I was nearly institutionalized because of the Fforde-induced bipolar syndrome this book caused.It wasn't just me. Hamlet (various classic fiction characters make grand entrances in all...

4.5*"I knocked at their door and, hearing no answer, walked in. When I was last working at SpecOps we rarely heard anything from the mildly eccentric members of the time-travelling elite, but when you work in the time business, you don’t waste it by nattering – it’s much too precious. My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offence – which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne...

This took me a LONG time to get into. It has been on my "to-read" list since 2008, so for a while I wondered why I even bothered. I started enjoying it about half way through, and then I came across a passage that made the whole thing worth it:(view spoiler)["Wait!" I cried out. "What?" "I can't concentrate with all those people!"Landen looked around the empty bedroom. "What people?""Those people," I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, "the ones reading us."Landen sta...

This might be my favorite book of the series. Time travel gives me a headache but Fforde handles it very well across this series, and the inclusion of classic characters remains a joy. (I still need a Mrs Tiggy-Winkle figurine for my bookshelf. Christmas, anyone?) The one mistake I made after Well of Lost Plots was to go reading about Thursday Next on Wikipedia -- spoilered myself for Granny Next, but that actually resolved itself in this book! Huzzah! And it was quite... I feel like I've used "...

This series just gets better and better, and if you haven’t read definitely put it on your radar. Something Rotten was my favorite of the bunch so far, because it had everything. Thursday trying to take down comically corrupt politicians (that were way to accurate), Hamlet learning to be more decisive, a corporation turning into a religion, and a croquet match for the ages. It’s unbelievably good and somehow raises the already sky high bar for the series.

With every book I've read in this series, I've said the same thing: this was fun but I doubt I'll continue on with the series. Well, this is the fourth book and I give up. I'm going to keep reading Thursday Next books because they're absolutely ridiculous and they make me laugh. This time around, Thursday is back in the real world, where she has to deal with fictional would-be dictators, semi-dead presidents, a husband who may not actually exist, violent cricket matches, 13th century mystics, a

I regarded reading the 4th book in the series more like a duty, rather than something interesting to pass time with. I didn't really want to read it now, but since I got through the first 3 I might as well read the 4th one too, right? Plus I would've probably forgotten the plot in a year. In other words: Something Rotten was bound for failure right from the beginning.... and now I'm wondering if I could just possibly insert yet another I somewhere in this paragraph: I!Two years have passed since...

Book on CD read by Emily Gray.Book four in the Thursday Next fantasy / sci-fi “literary detective” series. The Goliath Corporation is still trying to take over the world, though this time their scheme is to be declared a religion. Hamlet is staying with Thursday and her family, while she tries to sort out the mess that all the cloned Shakespeares have made of the original play. Thursday’s father, the rogue ChronoGuard, and her mad-scientist Uncle Mycroft, both make significant, though small, con...

After belong a little disappointed by the third book, this one was back in the 'real world', and just as much fun as the first two.The plot was deliberately complex, full of twists and turns. Nevertheless I found it easy to understand as events follow their own internal logic.The bad people were vanquished, the good people won (but not without cost), the funny characters amused, and the dodos waddled in occasionally to do their dodo thing.By the end of the book the major story lines were resolve...

This was just okay for me. There was so much going on. The author kept it reigned in, but it was like a jumbo zig zag. Usually I like busy, so I'm not sure why this rubbed me the wrong way. There was also a fair amount of repetition which caused eye rolling....not excessive eye rolling...just basic eye rolling.I liked Thurdsay. She was great. I also liked Hamlet. He seemed like the comic relief. Everything else was just okay.

This series is fun and full of humor and literary nerd jokes. The conceit starts to get a bit thin, but the series wraps up nicely here. I know there's a second series. I'm not sure I need that much more in this universe--maybe in a few months. Overall, though, Fforde is highly inventive and admirable, and the characters are warm-hearted and easy to like.

➽ And the moral of this rereread is: this series is a book lover's wet dream. And that, my Little Barnacles, is a scientifically proven fact (just ask Uncle Mycroft).➽ And the other moral of this rereread is: Hamlet Cousin Eddie + one-sided Lorem Ipsum conversations + Hamlet alpha dodos + Herr Otto Bismarck + outbreaks of unconstrained and wholly inapproprapiate Slapstick + officially sanctioned stalkers + Admiral Nelson slightly suicidal navy officers + Teutonic slap and tickle (you don't want

The fouth instalment of the Thursday Next series is my favourite one, the one in which all the plotlines set out earlier are woven together and political satire enters the series in a grand way.In Something Rotten, Thursday returns from the book world to late-1980s England with her two-year-old son, two dodos and the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, who wishes to see a bit of the world. As it happens, Hamlet's arrival in the real world poses a bit of a problem, for unbeknownst to Thursday, a fictional...

I really enjoyed this installment in the Thursday Next series! It moved more quickly than The Well of Lost Plots, and there was some suspense. Overall, it’s the characters and the quirkiness that keep me invested in this series. I love Fforde’s writing style, his humor, and the literary allusions. I love that the series is postmodern surrealist science fiction. There’s time travel, strange technology, and visits to the underworld. Mythological characters feature as much as the characters of the

Two years have passed and Thursday is still working in Jurisfiction and hunting the Minotaur, but she longs to return to the real world and find Landen, previously eradicated by the Goliath Corporation. Her son Friday is now twoShe returns to Swindon with Hamlet, who wants to see what the real world is like and stays with her mother and father. She gets her job back at SpecOps and starts to find out all she has missed. President George Formby is still in power but the Goliath Corporation has mad...