Thursday, September 25, 2014

A Little Le Carre' in the Night

My apologies for extended silence.  I might cite distractions that include vacations and recreation, processing of images from same, and the truly wondrous matter of having a young spawn running wild (and sometimes loud) through our former relatively calm and quiet quarters.  I want to think infatuation with grandchild is about as clearly a get-out-of-jail card as one could hope for.

I think it was an exchange with co-worker who urged me to sign up on Goodreads a while back that got me going after Le Carre'.  Our mutual recognition on that site keeps us posted on our somewhat divergent reading tastes.  Recent chat (live - we share a wall at work!) somehow brought up JLC.  I would have sworn I had read some of his work before, but I am now guessing not.  I was motivated to check out the offerings at the public library.

My first catch was The Looking Glass War.  The author's preface was not particularly encouraging, noting that this second work, on the heels of the best-seller The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was poorly received, particularly in England.  The problem in terms of audience reception, at least as preface has it, was that the first work tended to overly glorify the spying agencies and their ways, while Looking Glass was a more accurate reflection (and likely not cynical enough, per preface!) of actual shoes-on-the-ground British security agency reality circa the '60's.

I suppose I may get around to reading Cold at some point, intrigued at what I gather is some pretty intricate plotting and such.  I found Looking Glass a good read once I got comfortable with the idea that I would fail to understand quite a few Briticisms.  But it is indeed quite dark.  Those who do not rely exclusively for their news on pablum from Fox, the mainstream video, or print media will find this consonant with their understanding of how it actually (grimly) goes down.

I now have Smiley's People or something like that also on board.  Given all my backlogged books, I'm not sure whether I will get to it before it is due back.

My current books-in-play include Listening for Coyote, accounting a pretty amazing 1,000-mile+ backpacking trip across Oregon the long way, Isabella Bird's fabulous account of her remarkable 1870's visit to Hawaii, and Ludlum's Bancroft Strategy, which we have been listening to on cd in car and sewing room, stretching out now for over a month.  I have two books by Carl Oglesby, an icon from the late sixties, hot in hand.