What Did You Just Finish?

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Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

PsychedelicWarlord posted:

I've been working my way through every John Le Carre novel. Currently in the middle of the Karla Trilogy. I think my favorite so far is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is just as gripping as everyone says.

Comparing George Smiley with the image of Bond I get from the Bond thread (haven't read Fleming in full myself yet) is interesting. Smiley is a literal cuckold who is completely passive in all matters that have nothing to do with tradecraft. It's only when he's working on Circus business that he's able to articulate himself and be decisive. Le Carre essentially wrote the anti-Bond. Smiley is fat, poorly dressed, usually miserable, and not above moral calculations that even Bond would shake his head at. He's ill at ease in situations that aren't Circus-related or to do with German literature.

The Karla Trilogy touches on the scandals of the time: Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five. One of my academic interests was Cold War espionage, so I paired TTSS with the files available on the Cambridge Five. You can see instances where Le Carre ripped straight from the contemporary revelations, and other things that would only come to light later.

I think if I were to recommend a single Le Carre at this point, it would be either The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or The Looking Glass War. The Looking Glass War has Smiley mostly as a cameo and is fairly detached from the rest. It's about a rival group of spies who are essentially out to pasture who seize at the opportunity for a great undertaking. Coming off of the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , Le Carre wanted to showcase a failure and it's wrenching.

I'm doing the same thing! But slowly, because post-Cold-War le Carré is extremely depressing.

I was disappointed to find some of the novels good but not great - they've all been good, but not as great as the ones you pointed out. So far, apart from the ones you mentioned, I've really enjoyed The Little Drummer Girl and The Night Manager. Everyone else but me will probably point to A Perfect Spy as his best book.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2019 21:05

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 12:11

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Jerry Cotton posted:

I think you mean inter-Cold-War.

drat, you're right.

Now that you mention it, A Legacy of Spies, which came out a couple years ago, was less depressing than what I've read from the inter-Cold-War period.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2019 22:07

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

PsychedelicWarlord posted:

On to The Honourable Schoolboy now, which I'm enjoying. It reads much snappier than the previous ones. I think Le Carré really enjoyed shifting the setting so dramatically. His prose is usually very brittle and at times wry but it just flows in THS.

Enjoy it! It's an interesting shift from Tinker, Tailor.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 15:05

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I got like 50 pages into this and stopped. I think my dumb brain forgot what the objective was, like they were trying to follow a money network back to Karla's spy ring? I loved Tinker Tailor and Spy Who Came In From the Cold but for some reason Honourable Schoolboy lost me

Someone with a better memory of Honourable Schoolboy should correct me, but:

I found it tangential to the Karla plot. You can go straight through from Tinker, Tailor to Smiley's People with little plot loss, and I think that's what the BBC adapters did for the miniseries back in the day. I can only recall a couple of references in the third book to the events in the second book.

I do like the book, it goes exploring other ideas like (spoilered for Psychotic Warlord's benefit) :

The oversight of the Circus yet again puts a gladhander in control of the Circus instead of a competent practitioner.

The Circus itself abuses, discards, and allows to be killed good people in the name of geopolitical objectives of dubious worth. That's an obvious theme in many of his books, but I don't remember it being used much in Tinker, Tailor, and Schoolboy brings it back to the center so it's teed up for Smiley's People to drive it home.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 17:59

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Lockback posted:

I'm on Smiley's people now, though I quite liked Honourable Schoolboy. I feel like if they just changed Smiley to someone else in THS a lot of the complaints would go away, though I appreciate that it shows that George was not at all immune to the trappings of the role.

One of my favorite surprises reading Smiley novels was finding out just how complicit he was in the various schemes of the Circus.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2020 22:28

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I'm thinking of not reading the books or watching the show.

This isn't a bad solution either.

There are a lot of goons who prefer the TV show, and several like me who prefer the books, so Tommygun85 might go either way. Milkfred E Moore has been doing an excellent thread in TBB which covers both, too. I think that thread is still on the first book.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2020 13:49

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

TommyGun85 posted:

Leviathan Wakes ( Book1 of The Expanse)

Started this series after enjoying the TV adaptation. I wasnt expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it. The TV adaptation is pretty faithful, but to be honest I enjoyed it more (so far) than the novel. The novel is told from the POV of Miller and Holden, who are probably my least favorite characters. I expect the next in the series to be more enjoyable when more POVs are introduced.

Another thing that the novel felt it was 'missing' was the political perspectives of Earth and Mars during these events, which are present in the show and feature some great characters.

I am looking forward to Caliban's War (Book 2).

Milkfred E. Moore and Omi no Kami are doing an excellent Let's Read of the Expanse series, going chapter by chapter. I think it's worth checking out if you are enjoying the books (and probably the show, too).

# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 01:07

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Yeah I hated all those subtle hints of Nazi sympathies in Tehanu and On a Sunbeam.

I don't think anyone would argue with "many", and few would argue with "most", but "All" is a uh... strong proposition.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 15:54

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

If a random poster can find two counterexamples in less than five minutes those undertones aren't that inescapable.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 16:06

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Bilirubin posted:

This water here is continuous with water that probably touched a U-Boat in WWII. The molecules remember.

TBB: homeopathic naziism

# ¿ Jun 18, 2020 00:36

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Yes and maybe also A Perfect Spy. I think le Carré said critics preferred that one. Tinker Tailor is my favorite so far, but even the more obscure novels have been good.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 13:55

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

The Border Wolves by Amanda Cockrell (published as Damion Hunter). The fourth and final book in the Centurions series. I found the first book twenty years ago in a used bookstore, and the series was reasonably old even then (70s/80s, which I assume is why she had to use a male psuedonym). Some of my first Amazon purchases were the second and third books, which were hard to find and hella expensive for a kid working a summer job since they were direct-to-paperback and fairly old. If I recall correctly the third book cost me a day's tips.

The series had been cancelled after the third book, and I spent at least a dozen years assuming it would never be finished. Somehow she was able to revive the series under a new publisher, and she published a fourth and final book, almost forty years later, on Kindle. The print version is supposed to come out this summer.

The novels are fairly boilerplate (action/adventure)+(family drama) novels, but I think the prose is pretty good (great, for genre fiction of the time) and I have an absurdly high amount of sentiment for it since I can still remember staying up late reading the first one with a flashlight. If any of you enjoy historical fiction (or even fantasy, as the characters in-world very much believe in and occasionally perform magic) I think it's worth a look. When I got the kindle versions they were affordably priced.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 23:43

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

A human heart posted:

You've discovered this subforum's primary demographic!

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 14:06

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

dustin.h posted:

Orlando Furioso (Ludovico Ariosto, 1532)

A chivalric romance combining the matters of France (the legends surrounding Charlemagne) with the matters of England (Arthur and Merlin). Orlando Furioso is a very, very long poem covering very, very many events, but boiling it down to its most basic level: Orlando and Rinaldo chase after Angelica, who rather doesn�t love either of them; Bradamant chases after Ruggerio, who does love her (if somewhat inconsistently) but a wizard named Atlas keeps catching him in enchanted traps; sorceress Melissa drawing on the magic of Merlin�s bones commands an army of holy demons to aid Bradamant; and all the while Agramant, the King of Africa, wages war against Charlemagne � a war Charlemagne will surely lose unless he gets Rinaldo back on the field from wherever he�s traipsed off to this time.

Although Orlando is our title character, the focus is on Bradamant and Ruggerio. It�s almost at exactly the halfway point that the promised furioso arrives and Orlando is driven mad after learning Angelica married someone else. At that point he strips naked and rampages across Europe killing everyone who gets in his way until Astolfo flies to the moon to recover Orlando�s lost wits, but until then, he�s mostly out of the story. As Melissa prophesied in the cave, Bradamant and Ruggerio do eventually marry � the latter converting to Christianity so it will be recognized.

I kind of love Orlando Furioso. This is the third translation of it I�ve read, a prose version by Guido Waldman. I think it might be my favorite. Verse translations by necessity have to take liberties with the text to fit the rhyme and meter. In prose, you can do it straight.

No inscriptions.

That sounds amazing, buying a copy now.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2021 20:05

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Armauk posted:

I also read this book and enjoyed it. Do you have other recommendations of similar caliber? Maybe something a little more advanced?

I liked Sandworm by Andy Greenberg, and I heard about it from other infosec people (who heard about it on Darknet Diaries).

# ¿ Jul 14, 2022 05:13

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

tuyop posted:

Yeah I put that one down maybe 30 pages in. Sucks because I loved Uprooted and Spinning Silver but oh well, A Deadly Education was a turd.

Mileage may vary, I had a hard time finishing Uprooted and thought it was mediocre, but loved the Deadly Education trilogy.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2023 15:04

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 12:11

Sarern: Nov 4, 2008; Won't you take me to
Bomertown?
Won't you take me to
BONERTOWN?

Finished The Mysteries by Bill Watterson (yes, that one) and John Kascht. It's very short and extremely good. A sort of adult fable with cool black and white art.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2023 13:21

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