Friday, April 19, 2013

John LeCarre

There is a fantastic interview of John LeCarre in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It was very enlightening and has gotten me interested in rereading some of his books. I found some of his recent books too preachy, especially The Mission Song. However, the description made me want to find and read A Most Wanted Man.

I do have the omnibus of the Smiley novels and read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and am almost at the end of The Honourable Schoolboy. I have held off with it since the end seems like Smiley was betrayed by his own people. Maybe it's time to go back?

Wikipedia has a list of all LeCarre's books. (link here)

Novels

[edit]Non-fiction

[edit]Short stories

  • Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn? (1967) published in the Saturday Evening Post 28 January 1967.
  • What Ritual is Being Observed Tonight? (1968) published in the Saturday Evening Post 2 November 1968.
  • The Writer and The Horse (1968) published in The Savile Club Centenary Magazine and later The Argosy (& The Saturday Review under the title A Writer and A Gentleman.)
  • The King Who Never Spoke (2009) published in Ox-Tales: Fire 2 July 2009.

[edit]Omnibus

  • The Incongruous Spy (1964) (containing Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality)
  • The Quest for Karla (1982) (containing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, SpyThe Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People) (republished in 1995 as Smiley versus Karla in the UK; and John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels in the U.S.)

[edit]Screenplays

  • End of the Line (1970) broadcast 29 June 1970
  • A Murder of Quality (1991)
  • The Tailor of Panama (2001) with John Boorman and Andrew Davies

Thursday, April 18, 2013

All my texts

This semester I had the opportunity of having a work study student to help me with things. So, I asked her to work on a project I had wanted to do for a long time. She worked on entering all my forestry and related texts to my Librarything account. I'm not sure what I'll do with them, but I am really happy to have these books cataloged. Some of them have no covers. They are too old. Maybe that will be the next project. Here  is a link to the books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/&tag=forestry-text


Canada


I read this in ebook format. It's amazing. It has some of the most emotionally painful scenes I have ever read. When the narrator, Dell, and his sister visit their arrested parents in the jail every detail brings out what a sad, experience this is. Yet, as a reader I didn't feel manipulated. This is how it would really feel. The author makes frequent use of repetition and foreshadowing. Again, it is done so naturally I never felt it was artificial. When the narrator says he never went to a place again or never saw someone again, you know something important is going to happen.
In a way the book relies a lot on coincidences to move the plot forward. Maybe the plot isn't the most important thing. The inner thoughts of Dell and how he reacts to the world are what count.

I also have this story in audiobook format. I intend to listen to it later on.