I finished Ballad comfortably. I also, finally, started reading The Complete Guide to the Menopause and managed to establish in an hour of skim-reading that it had nothing new to tell me, and in fact was going to irritate me in several ways (the author has Opinions on sleep & pain relief which do not match my experience). So I returned both on Saturday and can console myself that I still spent less in library fines than the menopause book would have cost me to buy and be irritated.

My other goal was reading bought-but-unread books from March. I didn't manage that but I did read two short books I bought on impulse, so that's in the spirit of the original goal.