Yay! My picture placement is working again! Thanks Mike.

Anyway, I love this series of books. It started with Mr. Darcy’s Diary. Then there was Mr. Knightley’s Diary. Now Captain Wentworth. In Mr. Darcy’s Diary, she did a lovely job of giving Mr. Darcy motives for all his behavior. That’s a little more difficult with Capt. Wentworth because Jane Austen pretty well lined it all out in Persuasion. To make this one a little more interesting, the diary starts 8 years before the action of Persuasion and invents Anne and Capt. Wentworth’s first romance.

I can’t wait for the next. I think it’s Edmund Bertram’s diary. Glee!

I love hilarious footnotes. This book has tons of hilarious footnotes. They crack me up.

Mainly, it’s book about his experiences in a public library in Anaheim, CA. ALA is in Anaheim this year. Hmmm.

Anyway, I’m very glad my library isn’t like his, but it makes for a good story.

This is the sequel to Chocolat. The long-awaited sequel. And I will never get the 5 days back that I spent reading it. Or not reading as the case may be. I avoided going to bed so I wouldn’t have to read this book.

Vianne has gone from a strong, independent, unique woman to a mousy, bland, boring pushover. Anouk is a stupid kid. Roux doesn’t show up at all for 200 pages and then only gets a walk on part. The new characters are worse. Thierry, Vianne’s boyfriend, is pompous, deluded, and narcissistic. Zozie is just evil incarnate. It was very hard to read the book when I didn’t like any of the characters. Bleh.

The Scottish werewolf clan MacRinnalch is in upheaval. The thane recently died from complications following an attack by his youngest daughter who has since been banished and is wandering London addicted to laudanum and yearning for music from The Runaways. She is the eponymous lonely werewolf girl. A couple of teenage humans take her in and care for her (often against her will). They are hilarious. Also hilarious are the Fire Elemental Queen and her adoptive-niece-elect.

There are so many more characters, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to describe them all, but I thought it was great fun!

I love Elizabeth Noble’s books. They are a bit like Cool Whip for the brain, but I like them anyway.

The good news is, the mother dies at the beginning of the book and gets that out of the way early. The rest of the book is about her 4 daughters and her husband and how they cope with her death. She also wrote each of them a letter telling them something important. The best part was, the dead mother was always respected, unlike so much fiction in which the dead mother was a control freak and an idiot.

This had potential to be incredibly boring. The authors researched bestseller lists for 16 years to try to decide what America wants from their books. Fortunately, they do a great job making it readable. Especially the funny side bars.

FYI: The perfect book is Reading Lolita in Tehran.

It is such a guilty pleasure to make fun of incredibly rich and famous people who wear really ill-advised outfits. Like I have such great taste, or the millions of dollars required to buy expensive clothes no matter how bad they are.

This book nominates celebrities for various awards for bad taste in clothes, accessories, hair, etc., then selects a winner in each category. The descriptions of the awards and the reasons for each nominee’s nomination are hilarious.

Please see www.gofugyourself.com for examples.

I didn’t like this one as much as The Year of Wonders. This was just a little too much story. It seemed a little unwieldy. The premise is really good, though.

A book restorer is asked to examine a very old (like centuries old) Jewish text. She finds some strange items in the book. A moth wing, a cat hair, etc. The book tells the story of how each of those things gets in the book, thereby telling it’s history.

This is pretty much a biography of Bertinelli’s weight. There are some other personal details in there. About her getting her gig on One Day At A Time. About her marriage to Eddie Van Halen. I liked those parts.

I didn’t like the chapter that was basically an ad for Jenny Craig diets. Also, it seemed like she’s spent a lot of time in therapy because she spouted a lot of what sounded like “realizations” she’s made about her past and how it led to her present, yadda, yadda, yadda.

This was a great book! It’s the plague in England. A little town decides to quarantine themselves so they will not spread the virus to the neighboring villages. This is the story of that year told from the perspective of a young woman who works for the local curate.

Brooks is a great storyteller.

This picks up where Letters From Pemberley left off. Jane and Elizabeth are married with a child each and live fairly close to each other. In this one, there are more marriages, a broken engagement, a death, and a near death. Not necessarily in that order.

The letters are all written from Elizabeth to Jane, her Aunt, Mr. Darcy, and a few others.

I like these books because they keep very well to Jane Austen’s voice and to period events and possibilities.

I think Mr. Dunn wrote this book on a dare. That’s what it seems like. How few letters can you use and still get your point across?

There is an island off the coast of South Carolina called Nollop. It is it’s own country named for the man who wrote the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” which uses all the letters of the alphabet. When the letters of this sentence begin falling off the statue of Mr. Nollop, the powers that be decide this means Mr. Nollop wants them to stop using those letters. If you break the law 3 times, you’re deported or executed. The story is told in the form of letters between citizens of this country, and as more and more letters jump off the statue, they have to be more and more creative in how they express themselves.

It was a fun read. Especially trying to catch them out in mistakes.

The major Greek gods are alive and living in London. Unfortunately, no one even knows who they are anymore, and they are losing their power. That doesn’t stop them from being power mad and fighting amongst themselves. Which gets them into a big fix.

So it appears that when you have a concussion and a virus, you can do nothing but sleep and read, as evidenced by the following.

Number of books read in April: 17
Number of pages read: 5769 (I know, right?)
Library books: 11
Books I own: 5
Borrowed from Debbie: 1
Fiction: 14
Non fiction: 3
Favorites: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gods Behaving Badly, Year of Wonders, Gentlemen and Players