Some weeks ago I put aside my literary prejudices (and my stack of brain-fogging capital-L Literature) and pick up Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel His Majesty’s Dragon, jumping on the great bandwagon of geeks who are suddenly keenly interested in Novik after Peter Jackson announces that he’s optioned the book and its sequels for a possible movie. The Napoleonic Wars reimagined as being fought with air forces of dragons — a clever premise and not a bad book. A refreshing absence of knights or sorcerors or dungeons; an admirable avalanche of unexplained archaic military jargon; an endearing overuse of semicolons. Will soon be picking up the sequels…

Film-geek digression: If PJ ever gets around to making these books into a movie or movies, I’ll be interested to see how Weta Digital’s visual-effects geniuses handle the as-yet-insurmountable (c.f. Dragonheart) problem of creating believable talking dragons. How to make these gigantic creatures with toothy, reptilian, presumably lipless mouths appear to speak English (and French) realistically and quickly, without their mandibles flapping up and down as though they were immense Muppets? (Not that there’s anything wrong with immense Muppets. The Napoleonic Wars as fought with air forces of immense Muppets — I would buy a ticket to that movie.)