I've been on the road for the last ten days, so updates have been limited to linking and Whoniversaries, and actually reading LJ and email has barely happened at all. If anything interesting happened while I was away please tell me!
Meantime I managed to read several more books, of which the first was this set of anecdotes, borrowed from 
wwhyte, about (southern) Irish elections mostly since independence (a couple of notes on the 1917 and 1920 elections, and on Cashel as a rotten borough in the years before 1832). A lot of it was material I had lived through or read about previously, though it is all entertainingly told and there are some extra details that I hadn't previously seen - for instance, on the marathon 21-stage count in Tipperary in 1943, or the biographical details of Richard Mulcahy, or Fine Gael's tendency to call elections at the wrong moment in contrast with Fianna Fáil's record of getting that right.
But Coleman concentrates almost entirely on Dáil elections, so missing the drama of European and Presidential elections, not to mention the extraordinary case of the 1925 Senate election (and for all I know local council elections may have also produced moments of excitement I'm not aware of). So while the prose is generally catchy, and it would be a good stocking-filler for anyone with an interest in Irish politics, I wished for a little more breadth as well as depth.