![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Trip to lending library: accomplished
Feb. 7th, 2012 04:04 pmFound my membership card and everything! This is a feat, okay. And went to the bank and paid all the bills and stuff, because it has thawed again and I can get around in Crocs. Took out the last Lymond book so I can finally finish it, A Moveable Feast for sororial unit because she wanted early 20th century and Hemingway and AMF is the only Hemingway I marked down as 100% BS-free (read it a decade ago and retain no content, only the feeling of the thing as per a lovely dream). And a bunch of Le Carrés, so I don't end up buying them. XD; No net savings were had because I then went to Bureau en Gros and blew $100 mysteriously on office supplies. When I was 15 I wanted nothing more out of adulthood than the ability to splurge on multi-coloured gel pens and silver bristol board whenever I felt like it, I suppose.
The two Le Carrés I had read before TTSS were The Little Drummer Girl, which I thought was pretty good but depressing, and The Tailor of Panama, which I loved. (This was undergrad, if not high school, since I know I read them a while before the movie of the latter came out.) This time I am starting at the top with FIRST PUBLISHED SMILEY NOVEL Call for the Dead, which is perfectly competent but very "first 100,000 words are for practice" compared to the later books. XD; In fact in a lot of ways it feels like a dry run for TTSS. ( Cut for mild spoilers. )
The other thing is I watched TTSS-the-movie THREE TIMES over the weekend, because other ppl wanted to see it, only not at the same time. XD; It stood up to the treatment, mind you. I have some extra points to make now but I have to get going from work.
***
Have gone on to The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold. If the movie were going to be remade now they'd get Fassbender and Skarsgård in. Smiley lets Control use his place for assignations like a spy version of poor Jack Lemmon out of The Apartment (one is not told but assumes Ann is FOREVER MISSING). Incidentally, Smiley's home in the movie is all dark and burnished and has that trendy Sherlock-ian retro-busy pattern thing going on, but the 70s BBC TV series gives him a WHITE ON WHITE modernist living room, rolling. The china figurines are canon, but one suspects the giant painting of irises was not the dude's own first pick.
The two Le Carrés I had read before TTSS were The Little Drummer Girl, which I thought was pretty good but depressing, and The Tailor of Panama, which I loved. (This was undergrad, if not high school, since I know I read them a while before the movie of the latter came out.) This time I am starting at the top with FIRST PUBLISHED SMILEY NOVEL Call for the Dead, which is perfectly competent but very "first 100,000 words are for practice" compared to the later books. XD; In fact in a lot of ways it feels like a dry run for TTSS. ( Cut for mild spoilers. )
The other thing is I watched TTSS-the-movie THREE TIMES over the weekend, because other ppl wanted to see it, only not at the same time. XD; It stood up to the treatment, mind you. I have some extra points to make now but I have to get going from work.
***
Have gone on to The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold. If the movie were going to be remade now they'd get Fassbender and Skarsgård in. Smiley lets Control use his place for assignations like a spy version of poor Jack Lemmon out of The Apartment (one is not told but assumes Ann is FOREVER MISSING). Incidentally, Smiley's home in the movie is all dark and burnished and has that trendy Sherlock-ian retro-busy pattern thing going on, but the 70s BBC TV series gives him a WHITE ON WHITE modernist living room, rolling. The china figurines are canon, but one suspects the giant painting of irises was not the dude's own first pick.
