Hacker News Books

Agreed about the book and miniseries, but for me the problem with the film is that the book "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is one of the great character-driven spy thrillers, so while the film on its own is not a bad film, it dumped vast sections of character development to get down to 127 minutes.

The BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is wonderfully done; have you seen it? Highly recommended if you like the book.

Are you saying that libraries should only have sensible holdings? Which ones are those?

I once checked out le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It was something of an action novel, and it was entertaining. Was that one OK?

If you've not seen "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" the film is well worth it, although if you can get hold of the BBC TV series of that and "Smiley's People" . To me Alec Guinness just is George Smiley, far more then he is Ben Kenobi.

Plus as a bonus the books were still excellent reading even after knowing what happens.

Highly recommend the BBC 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' miniseries with Alec Guinness.

I always liked Alec Guinness (Obi-wan!) but seeing this made me understand just what an incredible actor he was. BBC just knocks it out of the park here, and, it's way better than the Gary Oldman film (no disrespect). IMHO one of the best television shows ever made. Would totally put it up against The Wire, although it's an apples-to-oranges comparison for a variety of reasons.

FYI said miniseries can often be found floating around on Youtbe.

And they were available in the US about 5 years ago as "flipback books". I have John le Carré's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" in the format. It is kind of cute and smaller than modern phones, but the claims that were made at the time that it was going to be an ebook killer never materialized and eventually they stopped selling them here.

There is a certain vibe to many of his performances but if you consider that he even played (in the film not the book) a gay man in roughly the same time period in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a performance in which he is still a little bit cumberbatch-y for a brief moment but generally warm and humorous, there's more to it than that.

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" was a thinly fictionalized retelling of this period. John le Carré's contempt for the people in the organizations he wrote about could be seen as a reaction to the excesses of the era Greene wrote about.

Perhaps by necessity, these aren't good people. The le Carré view can be summarized as, for that business you need people who only need the justification of the approval of their handler (and maybe a few dollars) or a story about being aligned to a secret power to release their inborn urge to be an utter piece of shit. He describes a world of compromised people, working and blackmailing each other all the way down. That they often use investment banking and journalism as a cover is no accident. I found his books more entertaining.

I read a few of his novels and watched a couple of series, movies based on those.
For me, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy... with Alec Guinness was the best of these.

But one thing I noticed and liked is how dull the novels are. Not much happens.

Till then I had read/watched Bond and similar fiction. And John le Carré was different. The complexity, uncertainty, deliberation, etc. was far better IMO than Bond's action and cigarettes.

It was like watching Morse after Jack Bauer. And while saying one is better than the other is probably a matter of taste ("Bond lit his 70th cigarette of the day"), I liked le Carré more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy_(min...

Reading right now:

Charlie Stross, Halting State.

Jacques Barzun, An Essay On French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry.

Recently finished:

James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (nonfiction, highly recommended; more about the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy than a salvo in it)

Ian Banks, Consider Phlebas (first book in the Culture series, well-written but way way longer than it should be, which is annoying)

John le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (re-read this spy classic, for Le Carre's style)

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (peppered with nerdy references from the 80ies and 90ies, the style is annoying at first, but grows on you, and the novel only gets better. A great novel)

I was where you are a few years ago: realized that I thought of myself as still reading, but in reality I was reading very little. Then I decided to adopt a very simple system: I try to read about 40 pages every day. If I read more, great. If I read less, I don't punish myself or carry debt (this is crucial), I just try to make 40 pages next day. The point here is simply to have reading on my mind as a desirable activity. I found that if I don't consciously remember that I want to read, it's very easy to spend all free time in other activities (browsing the web, reading long HN/reddit threads, etc.), which I don't actually prefer to reading; they're just there in the foreground, in my browser. Just remembering the I want to read ~40 pages per day makes reading occupy part of my conscious foreground, and helps me read more without other important stuff really suffering.