Lady Susan by Jane Austen

A few weeks ago, I went to the library to find a comfort read. Thinking I might fancy Pride & Prejudice or Sense & Sensibility, I did a search on the computer and found they were all out for the next few weeks. But I thought I'd go and check the Austen shelf, just in case. The only thing there was Lady Susan. Which I'd never heard of before but thought "why not?"
Lady Susan was never published in Jane's lifetime and was found some years later in complete manuscript form in the papers she'd passed on to a relative (niece? maybe?). It has only been published a few times and keeps (in this edition) all the original language uses and spellings. Which I found really intesting. Mostly things like words e before i. And there were z's in places I'd expect an s and other such things.
So besides that interest, was it good? The book takes the form of letters between various of the characters. Lady Susan is awful. Conniving, nasty, "loose"...more conniving than Miss Bingley, and far more "loose" than Mary Crawford. She sucks men in and spits them out as it suits her - and always has a tale to explain away any bad gossip that may circulate about her.
By virtue of the letter format, you are left in no doubt of her two faced behaviour and so on as she candidly reports her true feelings to her best friend (who is later forbidden from ever communicating with her again by her husband).
The book is very easy reading, with some of the letters nice and easily short for reading in doctors waiting rooms/on the bus/while eating breakfast. I enjoyed it very much, though at least a third of that enjoyment was from the language interests. Lady Susan doesn't quite get the comeuppance at the end, but it is a happy ending for all other characters you've come attached too.
I'd recommend it if you saw it but perhaps not to the extent to hunt it down mercilessly!

Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer

This is the fifth in the Artemis Fowl series. I was set on to Artemis Fowl when the first book came out by the same person who sent me The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I am very grateful to her. :) They are more aimed at children than perhaps the Harry Potter books but are lots of fun. They can be frustrating at times as the start of the book tends to do a lot of recapping of the previous book. However, it is long enough since I read AF and the Opal Deception that I didn't really notice the recapping so much, it was obviously useful.
I was very slightly disappointed with the book though. Not a big disappointment by any means, just the kind of disappointment that comes when your favourite characters aren't in the story enough. For those that have read the books, Foaly and Mulch just aren't in this enough (particularly Foaly).
I'm also concerned that Artemis is going a bit too soft. (He used to be really quite nasty - criminal mastermind genius boy - but has been getting nicer over time. Which is all well and good but now he needs some really nasty opponents and he didn't quite get one in this book.)
Still, these are relatively small complaints. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it (particularly as I had been struggling for a while before that with a book I was not enjoying so much - I will attempt to finish it one day - and it was nice to just read something so fun) and will of course read any further installments.