| QUOTE (little pixie @ Aug 1 2005, 02:57 PM) |
| Eeeek ! The Harry Potter book leapt to the front of my reading pile and everything else got sidelined; I still have bits of the Sunday papers from 2 weeks ago to read. :rolleyes: I`ve got Terry Pratchett`s The Wee Free Men on order - since it`s for ` children` there won`t be too many big wordies, so that`s not far from a Janet and John book... :whistling: |
| QUOTE (LoobiLou @ Aug 1 2005, 04:18 PM) |
| What about the Johnny Depp autobiography? :whistling: |
| QUOTE (LoobiLou @ Aug 1 2005, 03:18 PM) |
| What about the Johnny Depp autobiography? :whistling: |
| QUOTE (jamiearmour @ Aug 3 2005, 10:39 PM) | ||
Does it have lots of pictures????? :wub: :thumbsup: :drool: |
| QUOTE (melian @ Oct 21 2005, 08:46 AM) |
| Sounds great! Except I'm not inclined to agree with anything you say EVER AGAIN on the grounds of being mortally offended by your new sig :snooty: |
| QUOTE (melian @ Jan 16 2006, 12:18 AM) |
| Is anyone still interested in starting this up again? As quite a few people are watching Bones on Sky, it may be interesting to see what they think of Tempe Brennan in the original format. The first book in the series is called Deja Dead by the very talented (IMO) Kathy Reichs :D |
| QUOTE (melian @ Jan 17 2006, 09:06 AM) |
| So how do you fancy starting from about the 27th Jan? That way it gives you plenty of time to recieve your copy, and also plenty of time for other people to join in :D |
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| Fforde wrote Over Easy before his Thursday Next novels were published. He has said his goal was to start with nursery-rhyme characters and then move to the more complicated creatures of adult fiction. But when The Eyre Affair became somewhat of a cult hit, he built on that series with three more. Two additional Jack Spratt books are planned. The next: The Fourth Bear. |
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| Fforde fiesta (Filed: 02/07/2006) Jasper Fforde may be big in fantasy but he's a demi-God in Swindon, where streets are named after his characters. John Preston meets the creator of a strange, parallel universe England's oddest, and most English, writer does not live in England at all. Instead, he is to be found halfway up a hillside in Wales, dressed in shorts and peeling potatoes. With his neatly cut brown hair, china blue eyes and finely chiselled features, Jasper Fforde appears to be the picture of mildness. If you were to pass him on the street, you would be unlikely to say to yourself, 'I bet there are some bizarre things going on inside that man's head.' But here you would be wrong. Fforde offers a bizarre mix of characters in his books, from nursery rhyme favourites to a kidnapped Jane Eyre Fforde's fictional world is a place where anything goes. Figures from old nursery rhymes meet refugees from classics of English literature amid a welter of gleeful puns and references to old television programmes, the resulting mix being set in a parallel universe version of Swindon. As well as being weird, Fforde's books are also unapologetically erudite: his first published novel, The Eyre Affair, featured a villain who kidnapped the main character from Jane Eyre. Given a recipe like this, you might reasonably expect his fan base to be made up of four very nerdy, very scrofulous people. But here again you would be wrong. Fforde's books are astonishingly popular. They sell in their hundreds of thousands - not just in England, but in America, France and Germany. There are websites dedicated to his w**k, a whole range of accompanying merchandise, as well as a Fforde festival held every two years in which obsessives from all over the planet can gather, exchange notes and re-enact scenes from his books. In Swindon, he's virtually been deified. Still smarting from the town's last fictional appearance - in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it was referred to as 'the arsehole of the world' - the inhabitants showed their appreciation by making Fforde mayor of Swindon, albeit for 10 minutes. Later this year, five new streets will be named after his characters. Now, as he sits at his kitchen table with a large mound of freshly peeled potatoes in front of him - he's making some soup - Fforde seems stumped when asked how he explains the success of his books. 'It does surprise me in a way, because they are pretty… well, strange. When I give readings, it's extraordinary because there are kids of 14 there and also people of 80. One reason for it, I think, is that I play with things and with characters that are deeply embedded in people's psyches from childhood. That strikes a lot of universal chords. Also, people of any age seem to find it liberating to be taken away from the mundanities of real life and plunged into a world where unexpected things happen all the time.' As if on cue, a giant, khaki-painted Chinook helicopter flies down the valley outside, its wheels skimming the tree-tops, its twin rotors thumping away. 'Oh yes,' says Fforde matter-of-factly. 'We get a lot of that; there's an Army base nearby.' Not only does Fforde's success represent a triumph for the unfettered imagination, it also offers a heartening lesson in the virtues of perseverance. For years he sent off his manuscripts to publishers, and for years they came back with condescending little notes suggesting he consider another line of w**k, or seek psychiatric help. After he'd clocked up 76 rejection letters, both his morale and his prospects sank right down to the sea bed. Then, six years ago, a publisher finally bit and all at once Fforde's fortunes shot dramatically upwards. 'I had always wanted to write, ever since I can remember. But for a long time that seemed as unattainable to me as becoming an astronaut. Although I come from a rather academic family, I was always pretty thick at school' - his father was the former Cashier of the Bank of England, whose signature used to appear on bank notes. 'I don't think that gave me an inferiority complex, but I definitely felt that writing was not for someone like me. Instead, I went into the film industry, thinking I'd like to become a director.' Fforde worked on various movies, including The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment, but gradually it dawned on him that his chances of becoming a director were even slimmer than the likelihood of his becoming a writer. Nervously at first, but with growing confidence, he began to 'scribble away'. From the beginning, his w**k was fantastical: 'Anything else bored me, frankly.' It also flouted almost every sacred law of publishing. 'People were always saying: "You can't cross genres. You can't write something that's part detective story, part fantasy and part comedy. No one will understand it." But in my impish way I thought, why not? Why not go against all conventional wisdom and change everything?' With characteristic perversity, Fforde plumped for Swindon as his favoured fictional locale. 'That was really just a matter of going down the least-trodden path. As soon as you set a book in Swindon, you've got a gag. But if I was simply making jokes about how crappy Swindon is - which is what everyone else does - that seemed boring to me. I wanted to make Swindon an exciting, dynamic sort of place where fantastical things happen. It's just a matter of taking an idea, turning it on its head and then sort of tilting it back again. But ultimately, I don't do any of this for great philosophical reasons. I do it because I find it funny." Other writers coming under a bombardment of rejection letters might have been tempted to tone down their material, to make it as middle-of-the-road as possible. With Fforde, though, it spurred him on to even greater weirdness. The second book he wrote, The Fourth Bear, which is being published this month in a much-rewritten form, featured his fictional detective, Jack Spratt, investigating the mysterious disappearance of a journalist called Goldilocks. Along the way he comes up against three, or possibly four, bears who have a lucrative sideline dealing in illegal porridge. Jack Spratt, of course, eats no fat while his first wife - not surprisingly, deceased - ate no lean. 'I really thought The Fourth Bear would sell. It seemed to raise so many fascinating questions. For instance, I was convinced that people would want to know why Mummy Bear and Daddy Bear were sleeping in separate beds. But no one wanted to touch it,' he says. 'That was a very low moment, and yet at the same time it really freed me up.' After that, Fforde decided, he wouldn't try to please anyone but himself. 'Once I'd decided that I was never going to be published, I realised I could do what the hell I wanted. I could be utterly me and there didn't have to be any rules at all. So I started writing this novel about Jane Eyre being kidnapped. At the time I happened to be reading a book about the Crimean War, and I wondered what it would be like if the Crimean War was still going on. So I put that in. 'Then for some reason I started thinking about what would it be like if dodos had been re-engineered as a species, and so I put that in too. Plus I mixed in a lot of vampires and werewolves - mainly to see if I could make it all fit together in a way that was fantastical on the one hand, and very English and completely logical on the other.' However low Fforde sank, he never lost his determination, or his sense of self-worth. Behind his boyishly cheery exterior, one suspects, lurk considerable reserves of both. And in some cloistered corner of his mind, he always hung on to the conviction that one day his luck would change. Eventually, he managed to get himself an agent. Then one day he was driving along near his home, outside Hay-on-Wye, when the phone rang. 'My agent said, "This is one of the strangest books I have ever read. In fact, I've never come across anything like it. But I think it's brilliant and I can definitely get it published".' Fforde was so excited that he nearly drove into the ditch. 'It was incredibly gratifying - like a massive vindication of everything that had gone before.' First Hodder & Stoughton bought The Eyre Affair in Britain. Next, two American publishers started fighting over the rights to publish it. 'The moment I'd done the deal, I said: right, now I can stop being a focus-puller and become a full-time writer.' And on September 3, 2000, aged 39, that's exactly what he did. Since then, the Fforde empire has spread out across the globe. In between writing books - he's clocked up six so far - Fforde keeps his fans happy via regular bulletins on his website, while his girlfriend, Mari, designs and sells T-shirts and other accessories. Every winter he shuts himself away, w**king for as long as 16 hours a day - 'I call it scribernating' - and emerging five months later with a new novel. 'It's true that I feel under more pressure these days, but only in terms of time constraints. I don't have any worries about my imagination drying up, or anything like that. What's more, I still get as much pleasure from writing as I ever did.' In a recent poll, Fforde was voted the 36th Greatest Living Writer in Britain. When I tell him this, he seems genuinely flabbergasted. 'Really? That's news to me.' He shakes his head in wonder and then mutters, all too aptly under the circumstances, 'It's a funny old world, isn't it?' |
| QUOTE (melian @ Dec 11 2006, 10:23 AM) |
| Does this need to be deleted?? |
| QUOTE (goth willow fan @ Dec 11 2006, 02:35 PM) |
| It's nothing to do with your post LP :lol: |
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| From The TimesMarch 31, 2007 Clicky To meet the author, right click A writer’s website once meant a blurry headshot, a biog and a backlist. Now a new world is opening up online. And it’s not just for the geeks, Tom Cox says ASK A FAN OF JASPER FFORDE what reading one of his books is like, and they will frequently talk of getting lost in another world. For a newcomer, a visit to his website has a not dissimilar effect. Like the parallel universe in which Thursday Next, Fforde’s literary detective, solves her crimes, jasperfforde.com is a place where time loses its normal meaning. By reading about Fforde’s latest book and his promotional T-shirts, and the posts on the forum (84,771 at last count), one barely scratches the surface. There is still the option of perusing the photographs of Fforde’s surreal, alternative Swindon, or competing to win a trophy by photographing yourself with one of Fforde’s books, or visiting one of the affiliated sites for The Goliath Corporation and Specops — two fictional organisations that appear in Fforde’s books. It goes on seemingly infinitely. Most website designs begin with a tree; this one is a jungle. One might be forgiven for imagining that the hugely popular Fforde, who has written seven Thursday Next novels in as many years, might have delegated the construction of such a labyrinthine site to his publishers. Not so. He set it up in 2001 with his girlfriend, Mari, to coincide with his debut novel, The Eyre Affair, and the pair have been working on it every day, without help, ever since. “The web pages are a kind of after-sales service for readers who only see a new Fforde book ever year,” Fforde says. “I also see it as an extension of the books — allowing readers to dive back into that world for a little longer.” He says the website is an important part of “a reader-writer contract that I hope will induce people to keep reading me year after year”. The geek appeal of Fforde’s books — Boys’ Own adventures with a female protagonist and an absurdist, grown-up literary twist — makes them a natural fit with web lovers, but the success of his interactive site (about 2,500 visitors a day) is also a sign of the end of an age when “author website” meant “hastily designed page with brief bio, outdated headshot and backlist”. For the writer of nonfiction, the scope for web activity is arguably even greater. Over the past few years writers of comic memoirs such as Danny Wallace (dannywallace.com) and Andrew Collins (wherediditallgo-right.com) have added to their success by inviting readers to post experiences similar to their own on themed online message boards. By enticing others to join a cult based on nothing (Join Me, in 2004) or go around answering “yes” to every question they are asked (Yes Man, 2005) and then report about the results, Wallace built up not so much a readership as a small army, poised to charge towards the Amazon website at the push of a button The official website of the This Diary Will Change Your Life books, benrik.co.uk, is an example of what happens when the reader involvement in a book becomes more extreme. The This Diary series, which topped the preChristmas bestseller list, makes suggestions for life-changing tasks for its readers to carry out (for example, “This week, join extremist organisations and out-extreme them”). Some 20,000 “Benrikians” (the name comes from an amalgam of the names of the Diary’s authors, Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag) are now registered on the accompanying site, with 5,000 of them charting their progress in their own Benrik blog. “We have a cult community of Benrik readers who are deeply involved in our books,” Carey says. “Not only do they write the site’s content, they also help to write the books: about a quarter of the ideas in our Diaries Will Change Your Life are reader suggestions.” Last week Books reported on A Million Penguins,a sprawling, collaborative online novel in which members of the public write their own chapters and also edit the work of others, Wikipedia-style. And while once one might have faced a fruitless search on Google for a favourite novelist’s web-page, now such an occurrence is rare. Stephen King maintains his own web-page (stephenking.com) and www. jkrowling.com has become an important point of contact between Rowling and her fans. It is yet to be seen, however, how more literary publishing will react to the internet age. Three of last year’s six Booker shortlisters are without an official website. Perhaps serious novelists fear that maintaining a website can only take one away from the more important business of satisfying the muse. When asked the reason for the longish gap between his past two novels, Louis de Berniãres put it down to “answering 25 e-mails a day”. While a site might seem like a marketing must, who’s to say every fiction writer should have a close relationship with his readers? Perhaps it isn’t such a good idea; indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the fragile psychological make-ups of Portnoy, Garp, Gats-by and even Jonathan Coe’s Ben Trotter not being damaged by having their own online incarnation. I put profiles of some of the characters from my own book The Lost Tribes of Pop on myspace.com. I wasn’t too worried about their fate in the big, scary online out there — but I may have felt differently if I had been setting free characters from a novel, and not just a humour book aimed at the Christmas market. I couldn’t help noticing that Holden Caulfield had his own MySpace page too. It seemed a little depressing, until I realised that this Holden was not a screwed-up kid from New York, the protagonist of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but a heavy metal band from West Virginia. Tom Cox can be found on tom-cox.com and myspace.com/ lost_tribes_of_pop Jasper Fforde audiobook review, page 13 Sites we like www.jkrowling.com Designed to look like Rowling’s wrapper-strewn, pen-cluttered desk, this is an interactive delight, and the only place for reliable Potter news. www.iainbanks.net For the buzzing forum, in which Banks is referred to respectfully as TMH — “The Man Himself”. susan-hill.com Veteran author and publisher sounds off in her regular blog. www.nickhornby.co.uk Music, football, books, and plenty of top-five lists to please the anoraks. jeanettewinterson.com Lots of fresh content (including a monthly column), stylishly packaged. |
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| From The TimesJune 23, 2007 Clicky First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde Marcel Berlins meets the cult crime writer Jasper Fforde ANYONE WITH A MIND SO full of zany, fantastic, original and funny ideas had to be just a little bit mad, I thought. Or, at the very least, exotically eccentric. It wasn’t just Jasper Fforde’s books that led me to that expectation. I had looked up his web-site. The index alone has more than 600 references; that’s before you start reading any content. Was this the sign of an egocentricity so vast as to amount to the unbalanced mind I’d been searching for? I was ill-prepared for normality. Fforde’s conversation is not peppered with jokes and puns (he leaves that for the printed page); he lives quietly in Wales with his partner Mari; his only indulgence is a De Havilland aircraft that he flies over the Welsh countryside; he’s obviously greatly enjoying his enormous success (all the more because writing is his second career) but is not boastful about it. “People say: ‘You write wacky, way-out books so you must be wacky and way-out.’ No, because if I was wacky and way-out I wouldn’t be able to sit down at a computer and write a book a year.” But what about his compulsive need to provide his fans with every scrap of information, however obscure, they might want to know? That’s not normal, is it? His reason is disarming. “It’s my after-sales service, part of the contract between me and my readers.” I suggest that his only obligation is to produce a book that his readers enjoy. But that would be to treat them with contempt, he argues. Jasper Fforde (his real name) is the only member of an academic family not to have gone to university. His father, an economics don, was once chief cashier of the Bank of England, whose signature appeared on all banknotes of the period. Fforde chose to become a focus-puller (assistant cameraman) on many British films. He started writing in his thirties (he’s now 46) and had completed five books – and received 76 rejections in ten years – before one of them, The Eyre Affair, was published, in 2001. He had almost given up hope. “I don’t think any agent or publisher ever read any of the books; they looked at the synopsis and said it was too bizarre. I got the feeling I wasn’t ever going to be published. But I was enjoying the writing so much, so I said what the hell, I can do whatever I want, because it didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to be published anyway. So I decided to bung it all in, add all those ideas I had, one sub-plot after another, and after doing that I felt I had a book which really worked, in a way which hadn’t been done before.” The Eyre Affair took off quickly, here and in the US. There are now five books in his Thursday Next series. The heroine, a literary detective based in contemporary Swindon (though the Crimean War has not yet ended, and dodos are house pets), travels into the contents of famous books to save their characters and plots, and even saves great literature itself from evil enemies. In The Eyre Affair,Next confronts an arch-villain who has been killing off minor characters in Dickens, then kidnaps Jane Eyre. In Next’s fifth and latest adventure, First Among Sequels, published in early July, she investigates the premature deaths of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, Pride and Prejudice is turned into a reality show called The Bennets and she meets a fictional Thursday Next – herself from a previous Fforde book. - Book Spoilers. No such summaries, though, do justice to the sheer inventiveness, wit, complexity, erudition, unexpectedness and originality of the works, nor to their vast repertoire of intricate wordplay and puns. (Players of Monopoly may recognise Landon Parke-Laine.) But why Swindon? “Most people use Swindon as a shorthand joke, like Basingstoke or Slough, so I thought, let’s turn it on its head and say that it’s a fantastically vibrant place where there’s nothing that can’t happen.” No one since Diana Dors has made the town so famous; his fans assemble there for Fforde walking tours and Fforde festivals. The town has repaid the favour by naming four of its streets after characters in his books. In order fully to appreciate his humour, don’t readers need to know a great deal about the fictional characters that inhabit his books? “I did worry about that at the beginning, but now I don’t worry so much. I don’t use really obscure characters. They’re ones people have heard of even if they haven’t read the book. They may not be totally au fait with Jane Eyre, but they know who she is. A lot of people haven’t read Great Expectations, but they know about Miss Havisham and her wedding dress. It doesn’t matter if they don’t catch all the references and allusions. They’ll know enough.” His other two books deal with the escapades of the Reading police’s Nursery Crimes division, headed by DI Jack Spratt, smarting from his failure to secure the convictions of three pigs for the murder of Mr Wolff. He and his sidekick Mary Mary investigate crimes involving nursery rhyme characters. Who was responsible for Humpty Dumpty’s fatal fall from the wall? How come the three bowls of porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears were of different temperatures if they came out of the same bowl? And why were Mama and Papa Bear sleeping in separate beds? He intends writing only one more nursery crime book ( :o :tear: ), but still has many ideas for future Thursday Next novels ( :thumbsup: ). Then, perhaps, he’ll create his own characters and cease relying on those invented by others. And continue to give his readers his after-sales service. He’s not only sane, but nice as well. First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde |
| QUOTE (melian @ Jul 6 2007, 01:17 PM) |
| He's doing a signing tour again!!! I'm off to get my copy signed next week :thumbsup: |