January: Gateway by Fredrrik Pohl. As good as I remembered it as being.
February: The five questions meme: I’ve seen this floating around, but part of the problem is catching it at the right moment and also finding someone whose questions you think you would like to answer!
March: [three book reviews:] A train to Paris, followed by a trans-Atlantic flight, is a good way to make further inroads into the books bought the other week in London.
April: Just discovered that
May: No long weekend in Belgium, but I’ll make the most of what I’ve got.
June: Two of my colleagues have been expelled from Indonesia.
July: This evening: train to Paris, for conference tomorrow.
August: The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston: Well, this is depressing. A Cambridge graduate, like me, who has dabbled in archaeology, like me, and now works in vaguely international relations stuff, like me, but is about six years younger and has produced a stormingly good first novel.
September: I’d been thinking of doing a post about the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire, pushed a little bit by
October: Back from Portugal. Got to swim in the sea on Wednesday and Saturday; had lots of time today to look around Lisbon; stayed in a beautiful monastic retreat house (now owned by a Portuguese foundation).
November: Atonement: A very good book, this, which had been sitting on my “to-read” pile for far too long.
December: The scourge of insomnia.
Lots of books, lots of travel, a little politics. Am off to Rome for 24 hours later today.
They’re not published as a series, but the Zuckerman books by Roth? The four collected as Zuckerman Bound (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy) and the three mid-90’s books – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain.
(It would be helpful to read Portnoy’s Complaint first, because Zuckerman Unbound is partly about the reaction to Portnoy, but it’s not necessary)