Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Introduction to Lost in a Good Book

Thursday's hopes for a quiet life with her new husband, Landen, are dashed when a seemingly impossible string of coincidences involving a falling car, a disgruntled Neanderthal, and a mysterious young woman leads to some extremely close brushes with death. Her jumpy ChronoGuard father rescues her just in time, only to reveal to her that the world is destined to become one big, pink blob of Dream Topping in a matter of days unless they can figure out how and why it happens. And just when Thursday discovers that she is pregnant with Landen's child, the Goliath goons eradicate Landen from existence, threatening to make it permanent unless Thursday retrieves her nemesis Jack Schitt from his imprisonment in a copy of "The Raven"—this time without the help of her now retired uncle Mycroft's mad machinery. Thursday's loved ones are disappearing, while her list of enemies appears to be growing steadily.

Luckily, Thursday's fictional colleagues in an internal book-policing squad called Jurisfiction have eagerly anticipated her return to the book world, assigning her to apprentice under the tutelage of one of their greatest agents, the abrasive Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Thursday discovers that the sudden materialization of Shakespeare's long-lost play Cardenio, which she had been investigating for SpecOps 27, was indeed too good to be true—it has evidently been stolen from the Great Library by a rogue character from the book world. With Miss Havisham and Jurisfiction's help, Thursday must find the perpetrator and return Cardenio to its proper home in the Well of Lost Plots—the home of all unpublished works—before the thief can gain all the power and money that goes with its release in the real world.


Reading Guide

1. Thursday's grandmother says she cannot die until she has read the ten most boring classics ever written. What do you think those are?
   


2. What sort of impact would the discovery of a long-lost play by Shakespeare make in Thursday's book-loving world? What kind of impact would it make in our world? What kind of discovery would make an equivalent impact in our world, if not the discovery of a Shakespearean play?
   


3. Aornis Hades is both a mnemonomorph memory eraser and a coincidence manipulator. With the former, she erases memory; with the latter, she murders people. Which is the more dangerous characteristic? Which act does the most harm to a person? Which act has the most impact on Thursday's life?
   


4. Destiny plays an important role in the first novel and coincidence plays an important role in this one. How does Fforde define a coincidence? How do coincidences relate to destiny in a world where time travel is a reality? How would you define a coincidence?
   


5. Thursday jumps into books, but she also visits Landen in her memories. Which world is more palpable for you, the world created when you can lose yourself in a book or the world of memory? Which world would you rather be able to jump back into?
   


6. Thursday manages to outwit the prosecutor in a trial that takes place in Kafka's novel. What other fictional courts could she have gone before? What would be the best case to argue in the other fictional trials?
   


7. Thursday's father says, "Scientific thought, indeed, any mode of thought whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else, is just like the fashions that we wear—only much longer-lived. It's a little like a boy band." What does he mean by this? Do you agree or disagree? Do you think it's possible to have the scientific thought equivalent to the "boy band so good that you never need another boy band again—or even any more music"? The Neanderthals are interesting new characters in the second book. How would Neanderthal clones be received in our world? Do you think it would be ethical to reintroduce extinct species like the dodo and the Neanderthal in our world? Why or why not?

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