One of the pitfalls of writing a series, I'd imagine, is trying to make each book in the series stand alone, while giving the new reader enough information to figure out the continuing character development.

The Bibliophile series is typically one of my favourites; I could read about Brooklyn's book restorations all day, but Birds of a Feather struggled under the weight of 9 books worth of character development.  Carlisle tried to stitch it in and avoided info dumping, but for someone who has been on board since book one, the feeling of repetition was unavoidable.  Add to this what felt like an enormous amount of summarisation of clues and suspects - sometimes it seemed we were 'reviewing the case' every 10 pages or so - and this tenth book ended up not feeling as strong as previous efforts.

But boy did I love the book stuff.  The plot of this one centers around Audubon's Birds of America and the author had me running to the google for more information about double-elephants and auction prices and bindings.  If you like birds and you ever have the chance to see a first folio edition of The Birds of America it sounds like it's well worth thee effort.

The mystery was... pretty good.  I never figured out who did it, but I wasn't surprised.

I'm still huge fan and look forward to #11.

This haul looks bigger than it is, as the first 4 are the only new books I received this week.

The last 6 are 'upgrades' - hardcovers I bought to replace paperbacks, during the Memorial Day sale at BetterWorldBooks.  

I have to say I was mightily disappointed with BWB this go around.  I think I have a fairly open mind about what they consider a 'good' book, and I expect their books to be just a little less nice than used books elsewhere with equivalent ratings.  But when our order arrived... ugh!  The box was well packed and jostling wasn't possible during the very long transit, but it looks like when they packed the box, they shoved the books in without any care - several the of the book jackets are wrinkled or ripped - all suspiciously in the same way, in the same area of the book (the bottoms).

We also got two without any jackets at all, which irritates me, but I can't swear the listing didn't say 'no jacket' so I'm willing to believe I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Ah well, c'est la vie.

Total new books: 4

Total books read: 3

Total physical TBR: 215

Happy weekend everyone!