This thread really made me take notice, looking over Lifting Shadows, just how much the importants of dates seems to deteriorate as the book goes on. At the beginning, every little date is made note of, the day they went into the studio, the dates the albums were released, the dates when certain events (i.e. James's throat accident) happen. By the time it gets to SFAM, no hard date about when they got into the studio is told, and by the time ToT comes around, it doesn't bother to state when the album came out at all.