john le carré

> Tag: john le carré

so long, and thanks for all the spies

Silverview by John le Carré

March 28, 2022 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

I got hooked on John le Carré sometime after I finished undergrad. I’m not quite sure what started it (I think watching the Alec Guinness miniseries adaptation of Tinker Tailor with my parents, or maybe it was watching and then reading The Constant Gardener after its award season run), but I got deeply into classic spy fiction for a hot minute (and have stayed kind of into it): I started with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, moved on to classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and also […]

East Versus West

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

November 18, 2021 by jeverett15 1 Comment

Alec Leamas is Britain’s chief intelligence officer in Berlin, but when his best German spy is blown and killed while trying to defect, Leamas quickly starts a remarkable downfall. Reassigned to a desk job at the Circus (le Carré’s fictional branch of British intelligence) Leamas starts drinking heavily and racking up debts. When he is caught stealing funds from the office coffers, he is fired without much of a pension. With his reputation sullied he is reduced to working in a small library and living […]

The Weekend

Absolute Friends by John Le Carré

Are Snakes Necessary? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

The Jedi Doth Return (William Shakespeare's Star Wars) by Ian Doescher

August 23, 2021 by Jake Leave a Comment

I really wanted to write separate reviews of these but life is incredibly busy right now so this will have to suffice… Absolute Friends *** This is another review I’m glad I slept on. I really wish I liked it more than I did. The beginning was great: two friends making their way across the chasm of time and space in the post-WWII Cold War Europe. Idealism mixed with low class status, the desire to create a better world but lacking in power to do […]

Do You Want to Win the War on Terror, or Not?

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

April 9, 2021 by Jake Leave a Comment

When the Cold War ended, a lot of espionage/thriller writers didn’t know what to do with themselves. Tom Clancy, in particular, invented new villains and resurrected old ones for the US to shadowbox with. We were the last remaining superpower and there really wasn’t anything threatening us. And then 9/11 happened. It was like plugging in an electrical socket. Overnight, there emerged a raft of anti-terrorist fiction that both purports to understand Islam (it does not) and/or the Middle East (ditto). It continues today, a […]

Brexiteers

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

September 7, 2020 by Jake Leave a Comment

In a world of constant change and rising menace, it’s good to know that John Le Carré still has it. This won’t go down as one of his great works but it’s still a pretty sharp take on the western world post-Brexit/Trump through the eyes of a disaffected anti-Russia SIS operative who has been mothballed for most of the last two decades while Britain and her American ally swung their swords in the middle east. With Vladimir Putin leading the digital charge to break up […]

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

My Mum is a Twat by Anoushka Warden

Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein

Intimations by Zadie Smith

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

Leviathan by Paul Auster

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rumble Fish by SE Hinton

Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

August 19, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were […]

narfna on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…#BlameMalin on this one for me, too, because she literally sent me a copy.
narfna on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”That's gotta be the new headcanon.
drmllz on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”I like to think the wife packs Hastings off to England to hang out with Poirot and enjoys having a whole ranch to herself...
Emmalita on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…Oh yay! Another #BlameMalin victim. That was an expensive miscommunication. I'm glad your grandmother is ok.
Emmalita on I liked this more as an exercise in boundary pushing for meI have to admit, I really liked this one. But Anita Kelly's whole vibe just works for me. I do have a couple of non...

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