Dear Bookworms,
Picking up fourteen years since we last adventured with literary detective Thursday Next, First Among Sequels finds our beloved heroine a bit older but no less embroiled in the complicated issues of real-world and BookWorld literature. 
Her role as the Last Bastion of Common Sense within the BookWorld’s Council of Genres, means Thursday must stay vigilant to prevent the passing of disastrous Fictional Legislature. On one side, she must avoid the impending genre war brooding over a border dispute between Racy Novel, Feminist, and Ecclesiastical, where Racy Novel is threatening to deploy a dirty bomb (a collection of inappropriate literary content). On the other, she needs to stop those who want to replace classic literature with audience-participation reality TV shows!
In her home life, her son Friday inexplicably seems to be rejecting his long-since determined career path as a member of the time-traveling ChronoGuard, and she still hasn’t admitted to her husband that her work with the carpet company is just a front for her continued literary detecting. Plus, with books having been written about her own adventures, she now has two BookWorld versions of herself to train as Jurisfiction apprentices, each of whom is uniquely unsuited to the task, not to mention a very unsettling presence for our heroine.
These are just the highlights of another imaginative Thursday Next novel that is just as packed with clever references and lighthearted silliness as all the others. Fforde includes many ingenious allusions throughout his works, covering areas ranging from literature to history to pop culture from which you can take as much or as little as you like and still enjoy every bit of the adventure.
Please note that this list does not cover all materials mentioned in this book, as that list would be extremely long indeed, but only those that are crucial to the plotline of this novel or have some kind of spoiler mentioned.
Some series consist of novels which contain a common thread but can be read largely independently from one another. This is not one of those series. Fforde’s fantastical imagination builds upon his characters and setting from book to book and consequently, all titles listed for the previous novels are excluded from this list. For those lists, please see The Write Teachers reviews for The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten.
What to Read Before Reading First Among Sequels
1 = Significant spoilers and/or pertinence to the plot of this book.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2 = References that reveal something about the classic but do not affect the plot of this book.
- They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Grave Secrets by Kathy Reichs
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
3 = Minor remarks that probably won’t spoil too much.
- Blandings (series) by P.G. Wodehouse
- “This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin
- “Love Again” by Philip Larkin
- The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conon Doyle
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- Pictorial Guide to Lakeland Fells by Alfred Wainwright
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Know of any spoilers that I missed? Leave a comment below and let me know!
Keep reading – and get your own copy of Thursday Next here.
Live, Love, Learn