George Smiley books

I just completed a journey through all the George Smiley books by John le Carre.  Overall, they were interesting reads and I would recommend everyone consider picking up one or two.  Le Carre is very skilled at choosing words and, especially in the early ones, I was pleasantly surprised by his prowess.

Since there are 9(!) books now with the latest addition of The Legacy of Spies in 2017, I won't review them all in detail but there are a few tidbits I'll throw out there.  Generally, the series follows the adventures of George Smiley, a member of MI6 during the cold war (though he retires almost every book and gets sucked back in). My favorite was probably The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, about a secret operation into East Berlin where the reader discovers more layers to the plot as the agent does.  I think it is a well done story about the compromises that big government agencies feel that they have to make under pressure.

The one that I differed from the most from the general opinion in a negative way was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which is definitely the most popular.  I don't know what's wrong with me but I could never really get into it. 80% of the book is one of the following: people remembering things, people talking to other people about things they remember, or people talking to other people about remembered conversations with still other people.  I get that it is supposed to be a more reflective spy novel than James Bond or a traditional thriller but... it just never hooked me. In the introduction, le Carre says that he struggled a long time to make it a linear narrative but eventually gave up, choosing the current form instead.  I think he might have been better off continuing to struggle.

The one that differed the most from the general opinion in a positive way was The Looking Glass War.  It was the immediate follow up to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (though there are very few repeated characters).  It is about a rival agency to Smiley's trying to gather information without any help from other agencies (the FBI and the CIA in The Looming Tower come to mind).  The author says that he wrote it as a more realistic view into secret agencies after the previous book had filled everyone with more "romantic" notions.

I made a little table to track some of the similarities between the books:

Book	Is George retired at the beginning?	Is George a main viewpoint character?	Subseries
Call for the Dead	No	Yes	The Mundt Trilogy
A Murder of Quality	Yes	Yes	None, it is also skippable for both plot and characters
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold	No	No	The Mundt Trilogy
The Looking Glass War	No	No	None
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy	Yes	Yes	The Karla Trilogy
The Honorable Schoolboy	No	No	The Karla Trilogy
Smiley's People	Yes	Yes	The Karla Trilogy
The Secret Pilgrim	Yes	No	None
A Legacy of Spies	Yes	No	The Mundt Trilogy

As you can see, in the majority of the books, Smiley is retired from the service at the start of the story and also is not a main view point character.  I have also broken with convention and declared that the the three books that most focus on the villain of Hans Dieter-Mundt are also their own trilogy. He probably has more page time in that trilogy than Karla does in his own trilogy.

If you are looking to get started, I would recommend at least the first two books in the Mundt trilogy as a jumping on point (the third one does spoil the big twist in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so if you really love the work maybe stop and read that one before continuing on).

Programming note: As you can probably tell, I have moved away from reviewing every book I read here and are instead using it as a storage place for thoughts about literature that I can't find elsewhere and so am forced to produce.  Happy reading!

Horns

Horns was a book that spiked in popularity last year due to a movie based it that starred Daniel Radcliffe.  I didn't actually see the film but I read the book because a friend had and wanted to discuss it.

The basic plot is that the protagonist wakes up one morning with, you guessed it, horns.  He quickly realizes that these horns have powers that affect the people around him and much of the book is an exploration of those powers.

Horns' protagonist, while not fundamentally unlikable, generates a lot of pity.  He has lived a rough life and, as such, doesn't use his powers in the best possible way.  However, he shies away from being completely evil, avoiding my complete disgust,

The book was billed as a horror story but there isn't really very much scary stuff going on.  Instead of keeping you up at night worrying someone will come after you with a hacksaw, you are more likely to be kept up wrestling with the worst of human nature.  (Despite what I said about a lack of actual scary parts, there is one place where the reader is reminded that the brain is a physical object that can be damaged without being destroyed, a concept that always troubles me.)

The book also has a quote that I really enjoyed. "When the world comes for your children with its knives out, it is your job to stand in the way.  Everyone knows that."  This quote, while it comes at a trying time in the book, is representative of the parent I want to be when taken out of context like this.

To summarize, while this book has an interesting concept or two, there isn't really that much special there,  It sits squarely in the no man's land between good and bad, without making huge leaps towards either side.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

The City and The City

The City and The City is a truly fantastic book, it certainly deserved all the awards that it received (Locus and Hugo among others).  It artfully blends detective tropes with a unique (at least among my readings) fantastical concept.  I won't go too far into it because part of the fun of the book is discovering this as you read but the basic premise is that two cities occupy the same geographic space but have different laws, language, people, etc and to go between them without certain permissions is called "breach" and strictly punished.

Whenever I read a fantasy book that doesn't have blatant use of magic, my brain always tries to see if there was some other explanation for the magic.  For example, A Game of Thrones passes this test until the last chapter (perhaps "passes the test" provides the wrong impression.  There are many fantasy books I love a great deal that do not pass).  This book, however, passes completely.  All of the magic is completely explainable while at the same time refraining from ever explicitly saying that it isn't magic.  I think the thing that I will remember the most from this book is how perfectly balanced the central idea is between a rational explanation and a fantastic one.

The protagonist is a detective (as you might expect from a mystery story) and it is told entirely from his point of view.  The way the book is structured all of the reveals, both the gradual ones about the world as a whole and the sudden ones about the resolution of the mystery, are excellent. The author says that he views this book as the last chapter in the story of its protagonist and that he would consider writing his earlier adventures.  If he writes them, I will read them.

Overall, I would give this book a 97%.

The Dirk Gently Duology

Douglas Adams is famous (rightfully so) for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which was, as he called it, a trilogy in 5 parts.  However, many people forget that he also wrote other things.  While nothing can really top the Hitchhiker's guide in the niche it carved for itself, the Dirk Gently duology is an good read, especially if you like funny mysteries with a taste of sci-fi. 

The two books are called Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.  They share almost no characters other than Mr. Gently and deal with completely different areas of science fiction.  You could read them almost in either order or one without the other (OK, so perhaps calling it a duology was a stretch).

I read them back to back after picking up the second book in Chicago and then months later finding the first in a used book store where I go to school.  They certainly have the trademark Douglas Adams' weird, funny, and slightly depressing dark humor.  Anyone who enjoyed Hitchhiker's will enjoy these.

The main character is a detective who believes in the interconnectedness of all things.  Acting upon these beliefs gets him into very silly situations and yet things always seem to work out for him.  I laughed out loud at some parts of this book.

A note of warning, don't go into this expecting a traditional whodunit.  This definitely has science fiction and fantasy elements and if you don't like those mixed with your mystery then these books will probably be a disappointment.

Overall, I would give these two an 83%.

Sherlock Holmes

The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson have endured in the public mind for over a century, most recently appearing in a feature film and a BBC television show. Over the past year or so, I have been working my way through all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. This comprises a total of 4 novellas and 5 short story collections. I have to say, while they are sometimes slightly repetitive and predictable if you take them all in at once, they are enjoyable reads. The short stories make excellent little things to read before you go to sleep or while you are waiting for the bus. The first two novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (which has a boat chase!) could be considered complete books, one a sequel for the other but the second two novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear, are basically just longer versions of the short stories.

Instead of detailing my thoughts about all of the stories and novellas, I am just going to discuss my favorite in each of the categories in this post.  Perhaps I will come back to others at a later date.

My favorite of the novellas was The Study in Scarlet. This was the first story published and the characters of Holmes and Watson get some fleshing out that they do not get very much of in the later stories. However, what really made this novel shine for me was, unlike most of the other Sherlock Holmes stories, which are generally narrated by Watson in the first person, this one has an entire section on the criminal's background in the third person. This section could make a compelling, if short, western by itself and was a surprising bonus.

My favorite of the short stories was The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. This came from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, which is widely declared to be the worst of the short story collections; however, I did not find it bad at all. In the Adventure of the Illustrious Client, like in so many other Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson is used as a distraction while Holmes does something else. Unlike those other stories, in this one Watson knows he is a distraction and has time to prepare for the role. Also, unlike many other Sherlock Holmes stories, in this one Holmes is not out to solve a mystery but to influence an opinion.

Overall, while there are some repetitive themes in the stories (Watson being a distraction, people believed dead being still alive, among others) each story brings something unique to the table and I am glad that I read them all, rather than just a selection of them.

While some of  the stories are good and others are bad (which is completely understandable considering the sheer volume of stories Doyle wrote) I would give the overall series an 80% with certain stories being all the way up to a 95% and some down to 70%.