2023 in Review: Separating the Macro from the Micro

Coming into the final weekend of 2023, it seems like a good time to look back on the whole year and what I got up to. There were highs and lows in my own life, while the wider world just seemed to get more chaotic and unpleasant. The trick, as ever, is separating those two facets from each other and recognizing when things have gone well for me.

Taking each of my personal categories one by one, I can say that writing was a mixed bag but probably a little negative overall. I spent a lot of time revising some short stories and a novel, but didn't write anything new or send (almost anything) out for submission. With regard to the novel revisions, I do think that I made some good progress and I should be set up for making some agent submissions in the new year. Also, I hope that having something out on submission makes it easier for me to move ahead to the next project to write - I just wish I could get the balance of writing, revising and submitting stories right.

On the dating front, 2022 was positive just from the perspective of getting out there again, but 2023 was much better, and indeed has to rank higher than any year of my dating life other than 2019, when I met my ex (2020 and 2021 don't count, because I was in a relationship and because the pandemic kept us at home). The process, at least in the first half - or three quarters - of the year, was as enervating and soul-crushing as usual, especially when one date unmatched me on Hinge the same afternoon that we met. But I wasn't exactly surprised at that, or even particularly sad. On the other hand, I had some very good dates later in the year and moved out of my comfort zone, so that has to rank as a positive.

With regard to health and fitness, another mixed bag. I seem to have gained all the weight that I didn't gain during the pandemic, which was negative. I also seem to have plateaued with what I could achieve in my workouts at home - possibly because I've gotten jaded/lazy, or maybe I just got too habituated to the workouts I was doing. I have, however, started going back to the gym, and may start working with a personal trainer again in the new year.

On the money front, things went on as normal. I think I've generally eaten through the pandemic bonus that came from not paying for the gym, the cleaners or traveling, but the point of money is to use it for things that are important, not to hoard it. Also, no matter what I spent on, I still managed to put away decent amounts into my various retirement accounts, so at least that's going well. As always, I'm hoping to build on that in 2024.

For the category that I variously call "life" or "other", I think I did a good job of getting out of the house. I had a good trip to Italy in February, experiencing skiing in the Alps and enjoying life in Turin outside of the summer/fall months when I usually go. I also spent a nice time with my mom in Rome, and then had a fun couple of days to myself in Munich, making for my first trip without family since Stockholm in 2019. I also managed to get out to a good number of cultural events, both online and in person. Regrettably, I didn't do much decluttering, so once again I have to defer that goal to the coming year.

Work had its ups and downs, as always. I started to learn a new topic, and found ways to marry it to the subjects I know more about, so hopefully that synthesis will help in coming years. I think that's all I want to say about that subject.

Overall, then, my own year was probably decent, if not great. I didn't make as much progress as I'd have liked in some of the more important areas, but I am happy about coming further out of my pandemic-related torpor. I wouldn't say it exactly held me back in 2022, but nevertheless it's been important to start living a little more normally again, although I've continued wearing a mask in many indoor and crowded places, and I've kept up with my Covid boosters.

Looking at the world more widely, it's hard to be as optimistic. Politics has just gotten more chaotic and unpleasant worldwide, but especially in the four countries that are my heart's home: the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. The far right is a problem in each, though to varying degrees, but it's surely not overstating things to say that if the US votes in Trump again in 2024, the world as a whole is going to get less safe.

One positive is that the Dobbs decision from last year, which ended the federal right to abortions and devolved it to the states, seems to have galvanized the progressive side of the electorate. However, that doesn't really let the Democratic establishment off the hook for 50 years of ignoring the right's increasing attacks on the right to abortion, culminating in Dobbs; it's also an open question as to whether Democratic voters will continue to mobilize around that topic, or if too many are being turned off by the situation in Israel and Gaza.

I've long argued that there wasn't a single cause for Trump winning the 2016 election, but the most fundamental was that Democrats just couldn't be bothered to turn up, whether for the primaries or the general. 2020 was a different beast, because we'd seen what a Trump presidency entailed (including bungling the pandemic response), and turnout in the primaries was up again. The danger here is that Democrats once again are too jaded to go out and vote when we get to November - whether because they think President Biden is too old, too establishment or they're unhappy with his handling of Israel and Gaza. But because there's no Democratic primary this time, we won't know that before the fall.

Culturally, the biggest story was Twitter. It struck me the other day that Elon Musk has managed to worm his way into everyone's heads the same way Trump did when he was "president" - it's become impossible not to think about him at least once a day (if you'd managed to avoid it until now, sorry). I've had to institute a rule with myself not to click on every story relating one of his outrages, but I've found it harder to keep from clicking on every story about what's going wrong at Twitter. It's also top of mind for me now, because I was forced to update the app recently and it became clear how insulated I'd been from its suckiness as "X". Leaving aside bugs and whatever, it's just no longer enjoyable to surf Twitter - which doesn't stop me from doomscrolling a few times a week.

I could go on, but it boils down this: you know we're fucked when the only sane-looking social media platform is Facebook.

At the macro level, 2024 is probably going to be at least as grim as... well, every year since 2016, really. But this is going to be the year when the criminal cases against Trump (hopefully) really get going, which is going to galvanize the worst of his supporters (btw, I'm not saying he shouldn't stand trial, but I'm acknowledging that this state of affairs is somewhere short of great). The election itself will also be bad: if he wins, that's bad enough, but if he loses, then his supporters are going to go crazy again and we'll have years, probably decades, of these jerks insisting that the election was stolen.

This will also be against the backdrop of increasing global temperatures and wilder weather, plus the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. There's also going to be some other damn-fool thing happening somewhere, which will destabilize the world even more. It could be the UK's general election, but I expect it'll be the collapse of the ruling coalition in Germany and potentially greater inroads for the far right there.  It's clear that far right parties are going to keep coming closer in election after election in Europe, and eventually one is going to attract enough of a majority to actually form a government, unlike in Poland and the Netherlands so far. It'll also be interesting to see what happens in Russia, China, India and Brazil.

I don't mean to get too pessimistic, but it's clear that people aren't going to get sensible overnight. The wave of rightwing populism sweeping the world is caused in large part by anger against the self-satisfaction and complacency of the elites on both right and left, and those elites haven't measurably changed how they do things since 2016. Until they do, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, and above all Trump, aren't going anywhere.

What I Watched and Read and Listened to in 2023

It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.

I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.

The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).

Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.

Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.

Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.

Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.

TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.

Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.

Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.

I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.

Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.

Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.

Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.

In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.

Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.

In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.

And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet. 

For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.

Thoughts on Marvel Unlimited

Despite my high-minded protestations that I don't really "do" Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this year I snagged some "deals" on the types of things that I usually buy compulsively. One was a set of fancy underwear that usually gets recommended by Wirecutter, another was a set of fancy notebooks from Field Notes (also inspired by some research on Wirecutter, and now among the 113 fancy notebooks I own, but so it goes).

The final one, which wasn't strictly a Cyber Monday deal because they seem to offer it to everyone who signs up for the first time, was a $19 discount off a year's subscription to Marvel Unlimited, Marvel Comics' digital comics archive. I've gone on a bit of a buying spree this year, having discovered a comic shop in Sunnyvale, but I'd been meaning to check out digital comics for a while. I could have chosen DC Universe Infinite, but I've been buying and reading more Marvel comics lately, so I decided to check out Unlimited instead... or rather, first, since I'll probably try out the DC one at some point soon.

As I said, I've been interested in digital comics for a while, especially since a coworker at a previous job told me about Marvel's subscription service. One of the things he mentioned was being able to go straight to crossover issues, which struck me as a good feature.

Alas, I haven't discovered that feature in Marvel Unlimited. It may be available only in the web version, or it may be available only in DC's app, or I may even have misunderstood what he was saying. On the other hand, when I have gone looking for a specific issue because it crossed over with something else I was reading, it's been quite easy to find. That's important because the archive on Marvel Unlimited is over 30,000 issues, most stretching back to the early 1960s but in the case of Captain America Comics, going all the way back to 1941.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my experience with the app so far. Overall, it's totally worth it, even if you pay the full $69 for a yearly subscription, but there are a few snags that are worth highlighting.

Starting with the positives, the first one is that huge archive. Assuming there are exactly 30,000 comics available (it's actually somewhere over 31,000, but bear with me), you'd have to read about 83 issues per day over 365 days to get through the full archive. That may or may not be feasible because, assuming 10-15 minutes to read each issue, it'd probably take between 13 and 21 hours per day to maintain that pace. For early issues written by Stan Lee or Roy Thomas (or indeed later issues written by Chris Claremont) you might need more minutes per book, because they're somewhat verbose.

Take that thought experiment for what it's worth, but the point is that there's almost everything you could think of if you're a Marvel Zombie. There are some gaps here and there, but as far as I can tell, none are particularly important, unless you're a fan of Alpha Flight or want to catch up on non-Marvel properties like Rom the Spaceknight or GI Joe (which was actually a pretty decent comic). The MAX line, for "mature readers", is also missing, but those books never really fulfilled their promise to compete with DC's Vertigo, so it's not the biggest loss. Big-name characters like the X-Men are pretty well-represented, as I found when I counted out the entire run of Uncanny X-Men from 1963 to 2011.

There are gaps in secondary series even in that family of books, like issues 51-54 and 55-59 of the original run of X-Factor, or a bunch of later issues of the original run of Excalibur. From what I understand, those gaps are because those issues have never been collected anywhere, but Marvel is constantly adding new issues to the archive. Most are actual new issues, as it adds books 3 months after physical publication, but some are also older, such as those Excalibur back-issues I mentioned.

The comics themselves look pretty good, at least on my iPad. My reading so far has focused on stuff from the early 60s (Uncanny X-Men) and from the mid- to late 80s (X-Factor, Excalibur and various books that cross over with them). The scans are smooth and high-quality, so you don't get that dot effect in the old issues from 1963; in a couple of Thor issues from 1988 or so, the colors seem to have been remastered via computer, so they look a lot fuller than they probably would have on newsstands at the time. The X-Factor issues that tie into those Thor books don't seem to have had the same remastering, but they still look pretty great.

In terms of quality they remind me of the Epic Collections I started buying in recent months, although for the X-Factor and Excalibur collections, the bulk of the coloring remasters seems to have been saved for the covers, which do look amazing. When I compare prices, I'll be comparing to these versions, instead of the hardcover Masterworks collections or the black-and-white Essentials.

As far as value for money, I was looking up the costs of physical collections of these same books, and I think I've already more than broken even. Volume 1 of the Epic Collection of Uncanny X-Men, which includes issues 1-23, costs $50, so it's taken me less than a month of reading one issue per day to just about break even on Uncanny alone. However, in that time I've also read the equivalent of Volume 2 of the X-Factor Epic Collection, which probably costs between $35 and $50... or it would if it were available anywhere, which it isn't.

If I manage to read all the books I've saved to my library in this coming year, I'll probably save the equivalent of around $1,000 in trade paperback collections. This is on top of the fact that not all collections are in print all at the same time, as mentioned - there may be gaps in some series, but the archive is still more complete than what Marvel makes available in print.

There are some negatives, though. The first is more a problem with Marvel's way of doing things, namely the way they restart series multiple times to get more "collector's item" first issues out there. There seem to be a lot of Daredevil series, for instance, so it can require the Wikipedia page to determine which series to read in which order.

The app is a little buggy, and comics don't always load when I tap on them, so that I either have to wait a long time or quit the app and open it again. One time an issue got stuck transitioning between two pages, so I had to quit out again. However, it's never lost my place in a given issue or series, so that's already a plus.

As I mentioned, I read the comics on my iPad. I prefer to read them in full page mode, with the screen depicting a single page of a print issue, but you can also set a book to "Smart Panel" mode, which shows one main panel at a time and includes transitions. Smart Panel is not a bad way to read a book, because it makes the images larger and guides you through them without your eyes skipping forward or back as you read, but it's tough to get out of the mode when you choose it. Full page mode is the default setting on the iPad, but Smart Panel is the default on the web version, and I never figured out how to transition to full page mode.

Speaking of the web version, it doesn't synch with my iPad, so (unless I'm missing something) I can't pick up my library on other devices. The search function is also a lot worse on the web than on iPad - on the app, I can search for a specific issue and it'll come up, but on the web there's a lot more wading through long lists of issues. This is a big problem when looking through a series like Fantastic Four, which ran to hundreds of issues.

These problems with the web version don't affect me as long as I have my iPad and an internet connection, but I feel like there's more tinkering I should do on the web. At the very least, though, it's disappointing that logging in with one credential on my laptop or tablet doesn't show me my library.

Overall, though, it's been a good investment and a fun way to delve deep into the X-Men archives. If I stick with one issue of Uncanny per day, I'll only get to about #365, so sometime in the 90s, and it won't give me time to catch up with the other characters I want to follow, like Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, unless I keep my subscription for the next ten years or so. But as I said, sticking with the X-Men family of books and the stuff I've saved to my library, I'll save hundreds of dollars compared with buying at the store.

Of course, that's only saving me money on Marvel books. DC has a longer history of packaging storylines for collections, and has recently been collecting entire runs in one or two volumes, so unless I also get a DC subscription, that comics budget is likely to go to Volume 2 of the Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan Question series, among others.

Still, I like having the majority of the Marvel Universe at my fingertips, and I'm enjoying reading these old comics in a format that makes the art and lettering look great, even for older books. If you're at all a fan of Marvel's big-name characters, you should definitely get this subscription. Even at the full price of $10 per month, it's an amazing value.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Slow Horses

For the last few weeks I've been enjoying Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus, with Gary Oldman as the main character Jackson Lamb and Kristin Scott Thomas as his opposite number in MI5, Diana Taverner. I knew about it as a book series, of which I'd previously read the second volume, because my dad picked that up at random once. I remember enjoying Book Two, named Dead Lions, and had resolved to check out the rest of the series someday.

Someday arrived when I finished the first season of the show, which I devoured in just a little over a week. It's one of those rare adaptations that presents a perfectly realized version of the source material - think later volumes of Harry Potter, in which Hogwarts becomes this enormous, sprawling place with nooks and crannies everywhere, rather than the one or two sets used in the first two movies. Only with Slow Horses, it takes place in a London that's recognizable and true to life.

Because this post contains spoilers, I'm not going to explain the premise of the show, but I will say that it and the book do a good job of conveying London office life. My first job was in a ramshackle old building in Southend with lots of quirks and where the endless tea rounds helped to pass the day. My next job was in a slightly nicer office, but in a quirky neighborhood... and not too far from the Slow Horses' place near the Barbican. Indeed, when they convene at Blake's grave in season 1, that scene takes place in Bunhill cemetery, where I used to take my lunch on nice days.

In that way, Slow Horses is a bit of a spiritual successor to John le Carré's spy novels, especially the ones centered around George Smiley. When le Carré passed away, one of the obituaries said that much of his books' appeal lay in the fact that they were chronicles of office life, ranging from interminable meetings to petty office rivalries. Slow Horses captures that vibe well, right down to the one try-hard who's always trying to get people to go to the pub.

Another thing I liked about the show is that the first season fleshes out certain things better than the book does. The three white nationalist kidnappers are given more motivation and explanation than in the book, and you see their fate after the failure of their plan, whereas in the book Hassan Ahmed manages to escape without the help of the Slow Horses. Indeed, in the book, the bulk of the Slow Horses are passive and don't accomplish much of note after a certain point, just sitting in a cafe near Old Street, whereas in the show they bravely sally forth to save Hassan.

Though in true Slough House fashion, two of them forget to get gas and are stranded by the road on the way to Epping Forest.

I was able to contrast the first book with the first season because I finished them fairly close to one another, but I didn't do that with season 2, because I finished the second book more than two years ago and wasn't sure if I wanted to read it again. Still, I flipped through bits of it as I was watching the last episode of the season, and it's clear that they made some big changes to how the Russians' plot plays out.

I've now started on season 3, and while I haven't bought the third book yet, I think I'll be reading that pretty soon, so I'll have a better sense of where the two works diverge. In the meantime, I've been enjoying the development of the characters' relationships to each other, even as they themselves don't really grow into competent (or even, in some cases, likable) people. It helps that they got actors of the caliber of Gary Oldman to star in it - he makes one of his typical transformations into the shambling wreckage that is Jackson Lamb, and truly breathes life into him, to the point that when I read Lamb's passages in the first book I saw Gary Oldman in the role.

The other nice thing is that, regardless of how many seasons Apple TV greenlights, there are about 8 books in the series, plus a bunch of novellas and related works, so I'll have a fair amount to catch up on. I'm especially looking forward to seeing who's still around by book 8, and how many parts of London they visit that I know well.