I was right about Granny Next!!!!
























erm... anything else? well apart from the little annoyances of repeating backstory this is a really great book, I like the little newspaper snippets, I liked seeing Emma and Louise Sherwin-Stark on the croquet team, I liked that Alan is a annoying hooligan and ends up in a backstory in bookworld :-)

oh yes, I agree...I was right too.

And am I alone by being the only one to start to panic late in the book when it looked like we might loose someone important?

Alan being a poo was hysterical. I would actually have liked to see more of him and his antics.

You've already read it!!!! WWWWAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!All American

Wow - I just finished TN4.
Yup, I was right about Granny Next, too. I just got the notion before I began reading TN4. Looking back it was really obvious, but isn't it always so if you know it?

Regarding the book I found it a bit slow in the beginning but it soon became like one expects of a Thursday Next novel.
The Lorem Ipsum bit was a nice idea.

I was surprised it came out one month before the Amazon release date...

And finally, to end my unsorted rambling, does anyone else hope that there will be a paperback version of "Something Rotten" with the old European design with the Minotaur in a speedboat on the cover? I know I might piss off The Great Panjandrum by saying this, but I really prefer the old cover. I bought "The Eyre Affair" because it looked so unlike any other book in the bookstore, so I'm probably a bit nostalgic about it. But anyway, that's what I wanted to say.

Greetings from Germany
Klaus

I prefer the old covers too, if that's any consolation...

I prefer the new cover, although admittedly it was the dodo on the front that made me curious enough to read TEA.

I was right about Granny Next, too...


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"Warning: Product may contain Newts!"

Hee! That was fun. I think I laughed more at the ending than I have at any book for a while.

I was a little dissapointed with the last book, but Jasper's back on form.

And I had my suspicions about granny...

I guessed about Granny, and when I got to that bit in the book I yelled rather loudly 'Yes! I was right!' andd everyone else in the room who was quietly watching the television told me to shut up. Ah, delightful.

When I picked up the book in WH Smith this morning the woman gave the cover a funny look and said 'That's... colourful.' to which I replied 'Yes, it is'. And consequently left her looking rather bemused in the shop. :)

After Friday's first few words in English I expected to hear a few more from him too, but apparently not. Ah well, never mind - I liked the Lorem Ipsum bit anyway. And Olde Englishe was very funny.



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

I just finished the book, and there was a real sense of finality, of "loose end tying" about it. I heard that Jasper was taking a year off writing any more Thursday Next stories, but could this be the last one? Can it be true?

I beleive Nursery crimes will be released next year. Not a thursday Next, but good all the same. The year after that will be a new thursday Next.

And not all of the loose ends were tied up: For one thing, the Minotaur's still somewhere out there...


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"Customers are advised that this product may contain meat
from re-engineered species."

In fact, I'd say it's time to go back over the first 3 books, and find all the new loose ends created by Granny Next being who she is.

I think we were all right about Granny Next!!!

A very good read, i finished TWOLP on saturday after reading the previous TN books and slipped right into SR. It was like reading one big long adventure, how Fforde comes up with some of the things he does is fantastic (Grammasite's being a particular favourit of mine) and i hope he continues to do so.

I too got a sense of finality from the book, but there are still many things unexploered with in the Nextian world, the 28 desendents of Thursday who make a brief appearance give me hope for future books, and the Minotaur is still out there...somewhere.

as is Aornis...I have a feeling she'll pop back up at somepoint....

Dave: What are you doing reading this thread. You haven't finished the book and you're reading the spoilers !!

It is excellent though. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A lack of Aornis was a bit of a let down, but only so much can be sorted at once. I thought the steamroller and piano were her, but no. Although she could have been in there, you just don't all remember, she's good at that. Cindy saving Thursday's life was good, and the whole first person landen thing almost had me in tears. Fantastic!



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Turn the silliness to eleven!

Without wishing to offend, I thought the steam roller, the banana skins and the piano were a bit obvious.

Who didn't work out who was behind them?

Andy _
That's a good point about Aornis ;-).

Did anybody else think that Yorrick Kaine turning out to be from a book that doesn't exist in our reality, so that we couldn't possibly identify him correctly in advance of that revelation, was a little bit off?

(What I'd previously thought about his identity, even before the fact that Hamlet would be playing a signifcant role in this book was announced, was that he'd probably be revealed as Hamlet's usurping uncle Claudius...)

Apparently Yorrick didn't start off (in Jasper's mind) as fictional - he was going to be the son of Acheron and the student we're told he had an affair with (Ms Braeburn = Eve (apples) = son Cain/Kaine.). But then he turned out to be fictional...



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