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Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear (Nursery Crimes 2)

Irgendwie hatte ich doch schon mehr von diesem Buch vergessen, als ich dachte. Die nuklearen Gurkenzüchtungen, Mary Marys Date mit ihrem Alien-Kollegen, Jack Spratts Ehekrach mit seiner Frau (bei dem ausgerechnet Punch als Friedensstifter fungiert), der Showdown mit dem Gingerbreadman - alles kam erst beim lesen wieder. Und bereitete wieder höllischen Spaß.

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Jack said nothing but Mary was right. Despite the trammelling they had received in the past few weeks, the division's record through the years had been sound. The closing down of Rumpelstiltskin's straw-into-gold dens, the Cock Robin murder inquiry, arresting notorious serial wife-killer Bluebeard, the detaining of the 'Emperor's clothes' confidence tricksters, the capture of the Gingerbreadman and the Scissor-man, the Humpty murder inquiry - it had all been good, solid, unconventional police work. Good and solid - until the Riding-Hood debacle.
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'Because networks are everywhere. The road and rail systems, the postal service, the Internet, your friendships, family, electricity, water - everything on this planet is composed out of networks.'
'But why understandable?'
'Because it is the way you are built - your bodies use networks to pass information; you veins and arteries are networks to nourish your bodies. Your mind is a complicated network of nerve impulses. It's little wonder that networks dominate the planet - you have modelled your existence after the construction of your own minds.'
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(Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear, 2006)

25. Juni 1966
Andrew Wodehouse

Rosemary Wodehouses unter mysteriösen Umständen gezeugter Sohn, der spätere Antichrist, wird an diesem Tag, genau 6 Monate nach Weihnachten geboren.

(Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby, 1967)

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Jasper Fforde, The Woman who died a lot (Thursday Next 7)

Mittlerweile halte ich die Ankündigung eines 7. Bandes (Dark Reading Matter) für einen Teaser, so wie die angekündigten nächsten Bände der Shades of Grey-Reihe, aber bei Fforde weiß man ja nie. Und eigentlich rundet dieser Band die Serie sehr schön ab, Thursday kann sich endlich von Aornis und ihren Mindworm befreien und darüber hinaus die Erinnerungen an ihre nicht existierende Tochter behalten, und auch mit Goliath abrechnen. Und hat einen neuen Job als Chief Librarian, der in ihrem Universum natürlich komplett anders ist als man erwarten sollte.

I stared at the number of meetings I still had to attend on my schedule.
"I've got an idea," I said, "I'll just turn up tomorrow morning and start having meetings until my brain turns to jelly, then we'll stop and I'll hide for a bit, then do some more while thinking of other things, then forget it all by the evening and we'll do pretty much the same thing again the day after - and rely on subordinates and assistants to deal with actually running the place."
"Thank goodness for that," said Duffy with a sigh of relief. "I was worried you had no experience of running a large public department."
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"A drawn elephant has a desire to exist?"
"Certainly. All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The Big Bang wasn't so much a Big Bang but a hasty dash towards an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause. And in that split second, everything that wanted to have existence - which is everything - came dashing through in one huge hot mass. They've been trying to sort themselves out ever since."
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(Jasper Fforde, The Woman who died a lot, 2012)

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Jasper Fforde, One of our Thursdays is missing (Thursday Next 6)

Auch von diesem Band hatte ich einiges vergessen, aber auch viel behalten - besonders die Geografie der 'erneuerten' BookWorld hatte ich mich schon beim ersten Lesen tief beeindruckt. Und dass Fforde Fanfiction nicht nur eine eigene Insel gibt, sondern es auch eine wichtige Rolle in dem Band spielen lässt. Mir fällt es wirklich schwer zu entscheiden, welcher Band der Serie am besten ist, aber dieser, in dem auch die fiktionale Thursday sich behauptet, lässt sich eh schwer mit den anderen vergleichen.

I walked across the causeway with a curiously heavy heart as I had no idea how to get back, but once I arrived on the other side it seemed a party was in full swing. Everyone was chatting to everyone else, and the mildly depressed feeling I had felt over in Vanity seemed to vanish completely.
"What's the party about?" I asked a hobbit who had thrust a drink in my hand.
"Where have you been?" she said with a smile. "Fanfiction isn't copying - it's a celebration. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last full stop!"
"I never thought of that."
"Few do - especially the authors who should really accept the praise with better grace. They're a bunch of pompous fatheads, really - no slur intended. Nice clothes, by the way."
"Thank you."
And she wandered off.
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"What is it, Mr Fainset?"
"The Unread, sir."
"Causing trouble again?"
"They're all over Horror like cheap perfume."
I moved off, as tales of the Unread gave me the spooks. Most characters who were long unread either made themselves useful like Bradshaw or went into a downward spiral of increased torpidity. Others, for some unknown reason, went bad and became the Unread. They festered in dark alleys, in holes in the ground, the crevices between paragraphs - anywhere where they could leap out and ensnare a character and suck the Reading Light out of them. Even grammasites, goblins and Danvers avoided them.
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(Jasper Fforde, One of our Thursdays is missing, 2010)

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Jasper Fforde, First among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

Technisch gesehen ist es der sechste Band, aber da der ursprüngliche fünfte Band in diesem wieder aufgelöst wird, nachdem Thursday ihr literarisches Alter Ego besiegt hat, kann 'The great Samuel Pepys Fiasco' wohl nicht berücksichtigt werden. Soviele geniale Stellen wieder in dem Buch, in dem Thursday, mittlerweile Mutter von zwei realen und einem fiktiven Teenager, nach einer wohl verdienten Pause in neue atemberaubende Verwicklungen gestürzt wird. Mycroft als Geist, die Auflösung der ChronoGuards, die zwei so unterschiedlichen fiktiven Thursdays - Nr. 1-4 und 5 - der Käseschmuggel, das Wiedersehen mit der Goliath Corporation und die Strandung auf der Moral Dilemma, und zu guter letzt der Cliffhanger mit der Bookworldversion eines 'Serienkillers', das alles ist einfach immer wieder gut zu lesen.

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Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer may have died long ago.
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There was a distant hum and a rumble as the reading approached, a light buzz in the air like static and an increased heightening of the senses as the reader took up the descriptive power of the book, and translated it into his or her own unique interpretation of the events - channelled from here through the massive ImaginoTransference storycode engines back at Text Grand Central and into their imagination. It was a technology of almost incalculable complexity which I was yet to fully understand. But the beauty of the whole process was taht the reader in the Outland never suspected there was any sort of process at all - the act of reading was to most people, myself included, as natural as breathing.
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When you tell a tragic story, someone dies for real in the BookWorld. I was in the Oral Tradition. Potentially the best storytelling there was - and the most destructive.
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I'd visited enough poetry to know that it's an emotionally draining place and on a completely different level. Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire.

(Jasper Fforde, First among Sequels, 2007)

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Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy

Ich hätte nicht gedacht, dass es schon so lange her ist, dass ich den ersten NCD-Band (Nursery Crime Division in Reading) gelesen habe, aber tatsächlich ist es schon über 11 Jahre her. Da wurde es wirklich Zeit. Diesmal war mir beim Lesen wenigstens bewußt, dass es sich um das neugestaltete Buch handelt, in dem sich Thursday Next in Well of Lost Plots zwei Jahre versteckt. Einige Sachen, wie das verrückte Castle Spongg hatte ich komplett vergessen, aber dass der arme Humpty Dumpty gleich mehreren Mordanschlägen zum Opfer fällt, einer teuflischer und grausamer als der nächste, wußte ich noch. Den zweiten NCD-Band muss ich auch noch hier demnächst einschieben.

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Stephen King, Cycle of the Werewolf

Nachdem der beste LAG von allen und ich Sonntag nacht auf Tele5 die Verfilmung von 1985 gesehen hatten, wollte natürlich das Buch wieder gelesen werden. Zum Pfingstmontag nach-Frühstücksmorgen passte es denn auch ganz gut.