For value per page I think RIG Hugues’ “Structure and Interpretation of QM” is the best textbook in that list. Then probably Sakurai, which is not philosophical, but contains some good insights stated in a more understandable way than Hughes’ text.
Ask me in 10 years about Nutshell and the quantum gravity book.
This doesn’t necessarily count as reading but I feel like it’s adjacent at least. I listened to all of the BBC Radio Dramas of John le Carré’s Smiley novels, and enjoyed it greatly.
I was a huge fan of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie, which is 100% the best spy movie I’ve ever seen. When I found that archive (can’t remember how now), I thought it would be neat to finally get to “reading” the other novels. Honestly they’re all pretty great (with the glaring exception of The Honourable Schoolboy which is set primarily in hong kong and very often comes across as orientalist despite its best efforts), and I enjoyed all of them for one reason or another.
The first two (Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality) are pretty straightforward murder mysteries, which I was not expecting. The first ends up getting a bit into spy shit, and shows the first hints of what the rest of the novels will be about, namely an ethos of “yeah spies are all pretty shit, and end up getting into stupid situations primarily based on ignorance and egotism.” But it’s mostly Poirot stuff. I’m a sucker for a murder mystery, so these worked for me, and they’re pretty bleak so bonus points for that.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is absolutely incredible though. Masterful plot twist at the end, but at least 25% of the story is just Two Old Spies Talking In The Woods. This is incredibly bleak, bordering on misanthropic. The worst part of the radio play is trying to convince me that this 63 year old man was in his early forties. He absolutely sounds 63. Maybe older.
Otherwise incredible though, and really cements the John le Carré style of “spy fiction with no action at all, and also the few people who actually have ideologies are all murdered, betrayed, or forgotten.” I highly, highly recommend listening to this. Or reading the book. I plan on going back to watch the movie.
But apparently lots of people saw this as a heroic tragedy (it’s really a sad drunk and an idealist getting manipulated in an “ends-justifies-the-means” strategy that just reinforces the status quo of bad people being in power) so le Carré had to write an even shittier bunch of people for the next book.
The Looking Glass War is a satire about old men trying to relive their glory days. They do this by taking on a mission they are not prepared for using equipment that barely works, information that is obviously false, and a crew of people who took most of their ideas about spycraft from James Bond. It’s a little on the nose, but the amount of times i cringed and gasped at the sheer stupidity and callousness on display was amazing. It still carries the theme of “people in power will ruthlessly manipulate anyone they see fit” but this time the people in power are also huge blundering dipshits. Also the guy they send in as a spy immediately kills someone, fucks up the radio protocol and gets detected, misunderstands a bunch of information, tells everything to the first woman he meets, and then dies.
It’s great. I can’t imagine anyone coming away from that going “aw yeah spy shit is cool.”
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is really good as well - there’s more insight into the characters than in the movie, and it’s a fairly sympathetic story about trust and loyalty and ego and shit like that. It’s also, upon reflection, the bleakest story yet, simply because it ends with 20+ years of British intelligence being worse than meaningless, and actually playing into the hands of their enemies. It really leans into the “east-west moral equivalence” as Wikipedia puts it. I think it’s a smart and fun and tragic story. Highly recommended.
Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People are less interesting but fine nonetheless. They have the same themes, although Schoolboy suffers both from the aforementioned orientalism and from having a deeply irritating main character. I like Smiley’s People okay - it’s the most sad and philosophical of the stories, I think. Definitely about aging and death and become useless over time. It wraps up Smiley’s story as well, but it’s not really the point.
Also there’s a lesbian, that’s nice. She’s old and cranky and has photographic memory. I like her a lot.
The Secret Pilgrim feels like le Carré trying to drag himself into a post Cold War world, with mixed results. It kind of feels like a short story compilation with a connecting narrative, but it doesn’t really add up to a whole lot at the end. I do think it lays out le Carré’s philosophy pretty obviously though. It’s essentially conservative (“All ideologies when followed to their end are just ways of murdering people; the only important thing is the people we love”) but in a way I can gently disagree with rather than feel like I’m being hammered in the brain.
So yeah. As a whole, I think the series does a good job of tackling complex ideas of nationalism, duty, conspiracy, and questions about the ends truly justifying the means. It also does very poorly by its women characters, by and large, and generally doesn’t know how to handle anyone who’s not British. If I had to pick just one, it would easily be The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Boring Spycraft and cold war shit.
Now I’m listening to the BBC Radio dramatizations of Poirot novels, and they are distinctly less interesting! But hey, junk food is still food.
late to the Dick discourse, but uhhhh yeah, he’s a complicated fellow. i haven’t read all his work because, jesus, there’s too much and a lot of it is not good, but i think Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, VALIS (and The Divine Invasion) are my favs. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also a really fun time and kind of ridiculous, but it really illustrates how dreadful and boring life would actually be on other planets if we colonized them as is, which i feel like is something i’ve seen very few sci-fi stories really get into.
his misogyny is pretty overt, although somehow it feels not that bad in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (last i read it, maybe i missed something), and i feel like his racism is more of a casual/of the time kind of racism, rather than a directed hatred of non white people. that said, i haven’t read Man in the High Castle, so i don’t want to make a blanket statement on that.
also still haven’t gotten to Scanner Darkly; similar to others here, i went on a PKD binge at one point and after a while, you start to just see all the seams of his stories as they blend together (but, to be fair, i think this happens with every author i’ve ever binge read).
at his best i think he crafts some really interesting stories and dialogue, and at his worst, he’s an asshole.
but the thing i hear the most (and agree with) is that if you want a PKD-style story without the misogyny and self loathing, just read Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.
Reading Leguin is pretty much always good advice, IMO.
The simple read on Dick is that the racism is all conscious and critical and the misogyny is unconscious and ingrained. Pretty standard for a well meaning white dude in the 60s
calling him well meaning is a stretch
Something about PKD’s whole thing bugs me. I guess all the VALIS stuff just seems like a dude up his own ass.
Judging all of PKD by VALIS sure is some kinda take.
favourite pkd book is martian time-slip, although it has some dubious 60s era stuff about autism thrown in there with the rest of his fixations. i feel like what i admire about these books is how non-integrated they are: you don’t really read them for the house style, although i do enjoy the weirdly screwball humour and extremely perfunctory sci-fi elements draped across ramshackle californian settings (and feel like this sense of scrambled historic time is perversely what gives them their rep as more “prophetic” than meticulously worldbuilt sf). it’s more about the ways the books themselves always feel like they’re being pulled out of shape by some internal pressure - not so much the novelistic thing of careful point and counterpoint so much as staging grounds for some horribly unsettled, unresolved internal dialectic which expresses itself in these abrupt lurches into totally unjustified subplots, weird shifts in emphasis and interest, mirrorings that don’t quite match up. i feel like this is also why they can still carry some kind of charge for people who are otherwise totally uninterested in sf (or even novels more generally).
i think the other thing that makes his work resonant today is that he had a kind of paranoid (but often accurate) understanding of the effects of capitalism on technology and how most of these advancements were going to just be a huge pain in the ass and make life more monotonous and annoying for people. whereas the ideas of cyberpunk sometimes fail to properly click with some people because its aesthetics are “cool,” technology in a PKD book often feels like a nightmare.
Yeah! I always try to articulate this whenever someone starts to suggest that PKD wasn’t a particularly good writer, because he had such a knack for creating these scenarios and luring you into the perfect place to see it all move and be wowed. Really immaculate stuff!
If you haven’t read it, I would suggest Eye In The Sky because of the way it kind of takes this as its premise. That book is maybe the wildest, most intense trip I’ve ever been asked by PKD to sit through. Not his most literary or something something conscious work, but it’s a deranged blast I think.
Also totally agree with Isfet.
One of the ways PKD is (maybe accidentally) good at doing this is that his aesthetics, when he describes them, are very “not cool”. Like I remember in particular the clothing choices in Ubik were ridiculous.
yeah it’s sorta bleak and funny to think about how often the technology in dick’s books was filtered through the gaze of these recurring repairmen archetypes, and an emphasis on “repair work” as the deflating and human shadow of that technology, now that the futuristic aesthetic of high tech is synonymous with the effort to litigate small cheap local repair places out of existence.
I bought this with a chunk of my summer job money because…well…I guess I’d like to understand better the world that was at the center of my life for a few years in my childhood. It seems like I could get something out of reading the whole thing at least once. If the below excerpt from the introduction is anything to go by, it’s safe to say that I am in good hands reading this version.
matrilineal?
just asking on account of the truck
Not Jewish myself, just own the Jewish half of a book I tried to read when I was 12.
Footnote: My mom has been asked by several dates whether she was Jewish, which I think says a lot more about the prospects for a middle-aged woman in the DMV than it does about her.
oh I know this one, we have to divide a baby, not sure if a mohel is supposed to do it or what
hate it when my senses have feces
When I watch Marvel movies, I definitely feel like my eyes and ears shat themselves
