May

Mea culpa, my friends - not only is this post spectacularly late but the "filler" I had promised you all has yet to appear either. I can only blame the combined stresses of illness and house-buying madness to account for it.

Again, I have only three books read - all of them re-reads. It's been a chaotic month.

First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde is the fifth book in the Thursday Next series of novels, and like the rest of Fforde's oeuvre, is a cracking good read. Like The Fourth Bear, this one takes a while to get going, and is not one to be read strictly in sequence, since I don't feel it quite lives up to the same standard as some of the others. That standard is extremely high, however, and I think it's just when the book is taken in comparison to the others - read in isolation it's still brilliant, and eminently readable, just not, I feel, Fforde's best. Though it does explain the piano that turns up in Emma...

I then decided to begin re-reading Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and got through Temeraire and Throne of Jade. The basic premise is that of the Napoleonic wars... but with dragons.

It's one of those books that's pretty much what it says on the tin, but it's spectacularly well executed. It stands up well to re-reading, and probably will be read again.