The King’s Speech by Mark Logue & Peter Conradi
The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones (reread)
The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry (reread)

Lots of rereads this month, as I don’t have the money to buy new books and browsing my library catalogue didn’t turn up any of the new ones I wanted to read.

I was looking for series to reread, because they take up a decent amount of time, so I pulled the first Anne Perry Charlotte & Thomas Pitt book off the shelf. Oh, these haven’t aged well. They’re very flat, and I’ve stalled halfway through the second one.

Dragonsdawn was what I was looking for character and story-wise, but then I decided to read the Pern-rediscovers-that-2,500-original-settlement-and-tech book All the Weyrs of Pern, and that felt kind of flat and forced, too. In a while I may go back to the original Pern trilogy, but AtWoP kind of turned me off the series for a while. I pulled the space opera The Rowan off the shelf and that was better.

My reread of Charmed Life, one of my favourite Chrestomanci books, was done in response to Diana Wynne Jones’ death. I read it all in one evening, and I was about to go on to The Magicians of Caprona the same night but I lost steam.

The King’s Speech is a biography of Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who worked with King George VI, and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s written by Logue’s grandson (and a journalist, who I assume provided structure and support and editorial stuff) who did a lot of work with family records, letters, and diaries, and provided information and material to the filmmakers who created the 2010 movie. I have not yet seen the film (shocking if you know me; it was a bad six months for a lot of stuff I wanted to do) but the sense I got from what I know of history and the apparent timeline of the film was that things didn’t quite line up chronologically. The biography confirmed that my history was, in fact, not as shoddy as the film made me wonder if it was, and clarified a lot for me.