another reading update
May. 2nd, 2014 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerForgot one and finished another...
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré (9) Another re-read. A classic, perhaps the classic spy novel. From everything I've read about MI6/the SIS, this and the TV show The Sandbaggers are terrifically true to life, while rubbish like James Bond is just colourful fantasy. Again, as with most books, what keeps me coming back to le Carré's work is his art of writing characters. The plotting is well done, and the understated way in which things are often implied but rarely stated very much appeals to me as well (Dorothy Dunnett was the pinnacle of writers in doing this, IMO), but it's the people and the sympathetic and clear-eyed way in which he portrays all of them, whatever their role in the story, is what I love. I'm sure I will read this again and again for many more years. The film adaptation from 2011 was very good, both for its selection of actors and for its period staging (the opening sequence in Czecho is especially exciting), but for my money Sir Alec Guinness made the perfect George Smiley and the 1979 TV adaptation was definitive.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (10) A re-read, but from many, many years ago. TI is a book I remember reading as a child, or perhaps even having read to me. I don't think I've ever seen a film adaptation, so my vision of it is purely that of the author's words. I don't think that, until today I had even ever seen any of the Wyeth illustrations for it other than that of Blind Pew (a wonderfully evocative one). It's a great adventure novel of a rather dated sort; I'm sure there are things about it that the fuddy-duddys and PC people would take exception to today (though not as much as the John Buchan books I also loved), and its replication of post-Golden Age piracy may not be perfect, but I don't take exception to any of its details. RLS was a regular in our household when I was little; I remember The Black Arrow and Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses particularly.
In progress
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in World War I by Arlen J. Hansen (Some fo COl. Roosevelt's family worked in the American Hospital in Paris, which is mentioned here.)
The Captain From Connecticut by C. S. Forrester (several chapters in; odd to read Forrester wiring about an American)
French Napoleonic Infantry Tactics, 1792-1815 by Paddy Griffith
Enter Jeeves by P.G Wodehouse
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy (Learning all sorts of interesting stuff about the influence of pre-Islamic Persian religion on early Christianity)
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783 by William M. Fowler, Jr.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré (9) Another re-read. A classic, perhaps the classic spy novel. From everything I've read about MI6/the SIS, this and the TV show The Sandbaggers are terrifically true to life, while rubbish like James Bond is just colourful fantasy. Again, as with most books, what keeps me coming back to le Carré's work is his art of writing characters. The plotting is well done, and the understated way in which things are often implied but rarely stated very much appeals to me as well (Dorothy Dunnett was the pinnacle of writers in doing this, IMO), but it's the people and the sympathetic and clear-eyed way in which he portrays all of them, whatever their role in the story, is what I love. I'm sure I will read this again and again for many more years. The film adaptation from 2011 was very good, both for its selection of actors and for its period staging (the opening sequence in Czecho is especially exciting), but for my money Sir Alec Guinness made the perfect George Smiley and the 1979 TV adaptation was definitive.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (10) A re-read, but from many, many years ago. TI is a book I remember reading as a child, or perhaps even having read to me. I don't think I've ever seen a film adaptation, so my vision of it is purely that of the author's words. I don't think that, until today I had even ever seen any of the Wyeth illustrations for it other than that of Blind Pew (a wonderfully evocative one). It's a great adventure novel of a rather dated sort; I'm sure there are things about it that the fuddy-duddys and PC people would take exception to today (though not as much as the John Buchan books I also loved), and its replication of post-Golden Age piracy may not be perfect, but I don't take exception to any of its details. RLS was a regular in our household when I was little; I remember The Black Arrow and Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses particularly.
In progress
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in World War I by Arlen J. Hansen (Some fo COl. Roosevelt's family worked in the American Hospital in Paris, which is mentioned here.)
The Captain From Connecticut by C. S. Forrester (several chapters in; odd to read Forrester wiring about an American)
French Napoleonic Infantry Tactics, 1792-1815 by Paddy Griffith
Enter Jeeves by P.G Wodehouse
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy (Learning all sorts of interesting stuff about the influence of pre-Islamic Persian religion on early Christianity)
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783 by William M. Fowler, Jr.
