Stuff I’ve Read, Watched, Done #28 – December 15th, 2021

We’re a little late with my “weekly” round-up post. Normally I try to get it out on a Sunday, but this week on Sunday I was away with my family (the four of us who are here at the moment–my eldest daughter is over east on a missionary training program.

(EDIT: And even later still than I thought–this was intended to go up on the 15th, as it says, but apparently I forgot to press the “publish” button for a full week after that! Oops! Way to break a streak).

A Book Within a Book

In one of his Thursday Next series of books, Jasper Fforde had a plot where all the oral story characters – from nursery rhymes and myths and so on – were campaigning for equal rights as characters within classical literature.  The eventual solution?  Create a book in which they could all live and interact together, that could basically serve as their home.  The title of that book?  The Big Over Easy.  The punchline of this joke?  That The Big Over Easy is also a real book, one that Fforde had already written prior to the first Thursday Next story seeing the light of day.

Not in the form we have it, of course.  It was revised and changed in significant ways when he apparently dusted it off to publish it in the wake of his success with Thursday Next books.  But the core concept – a procedural detective story taking place in a world where nursery rhyme characters live and breathe…and die…alongside “normal” people has stayed the same.

Run, run as fast you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!

Only in this case, the Gingerbread man is a two meter tall psychopathic murderer who enjoys pulling his victims arms off…and that’s just one plot element in Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear.