This week's beach reading

Penelope Mortimer's 1962 novel The Pumpkin Eater, JK Galbraith's 1990 novel (!) The Tenured Professor, Eleanor Perenyi's 1946 memoir More Was Lost, Ian McEwan's 1998 novel Amsterdam, most of Bill Bryson's 1996 comic travelogue Notes From a Small Island, and part of an old favorite, E.F. Benson's farcical (from 1920) Queen Lucia.