Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde)
"Thursday Next lives in an Alternate History. In her world, Time Travel, cloning and genetic engineering are commonplace; resurrected dodos are the household pet of choice. The obscenely powerful Goliath Corporation, which nearly singlehandedly reconstructed England after World War II, now runs the country as a virtual police state. And literature, particularly classic literature, is very, very, very Serious Business. Writers are revered with nearly spiritual devotion, controversial claims about books and authors can be criminal, and an entire police squad, the LiteraTecs, exist to keep the literary scene in order. Thursday works for just such a unit in Swindon, with her friend and colleague, the exceedingly polite Bowden Cable.
In the course of rescuing her Gadgeteer Genius uncle Mycroft from international arch-criminal Acheron Hades, a gleefully evil individual with supernatural powers, Thursday discovers the Great Library, a sort of pocket dimension that exists 'behind the scenes' of all works of literature, where all literary characters live. They're self-aware, acting out their roles when a person reads a book but chilling out and living their own lives as soon as they close it. The Great Library is governed by the Council of Genres and kept in line by Jurisfiction, another police force whose task it is to make sure the plot of every book stays the same every time someone reads it. (Insofar as they can.)
Such is the universe of Jasper Fforde's meta-fictional masterpiece, the Thursday Next series. The author hangs a lampshade on everything and anything relating to classic literature, the tropes of police fiction and spy fiction, and even the relationship between a work of fiction and its audience. Heavy on wordplay and puns, the series deals with the tireless heroine's adventures balancing her work as an agent of Jurisfiction in the Great Library and LiteraTec in the outside world, to say nothing of her responsibilities as a wife and mother."
Squee's Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors (Jhonen Vasquez)
"Squee (named after the sound he makes when he's afraid) is a little boy whose short life is an unending parade of horrors. His parents outwardly detest him to the point where his father watches footage of his birth played in reverse for amusement, and the only kid in school who likes him is the Antichrist, who Squee is terrified of. He has never, ever, ever, had a good dream. Through the course of the book, he is visited by aliens, ghosts, zombies, time travelers and the serial killer next door.
Though Squee is as frightened by all this as anyone else might be, he takes it in his stride with a passive resilience that only a child could possess and the help of Shmee, his teddy bear and 'trauma-sponge.' He gets through the horrors just by being a simple-minded kid. Adults dwell on the past and the future. Kids live squarely in the present, daydream about flying and drink Tang until they forget it all. He takes for granted that the world is scary and just goes to school each day, provided he hasn't been abducted by aliens."
Other Leitner Bracket Round 1 Bout 12
Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde)
Squee's Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors (Jhonen Vasquez)
Voting ended onJun 18, 2024
