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The Idle Book Club 9: Summer Reads

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We realized we were dead-beats and chose to put out a Summer Reads episode. We're going to do Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway in August and then Wolf Hall, finally, in September. Enjoy!

 

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On this episode: After a scheduling hiccup (snafu? derailment? disaster?) the guys are back to bring you their summer reading selections. On offer this month: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carre, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Next Month: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and then Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel in September. We promise!

 

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Consider the Lobster may not be my favorite DFW non-fiction collection, but it's what that finally convinced me to tackle Infinite Jest. Most of the essays in Consider the Lobster were written around the same time DFW was finishing Jest, and you can really see how the fiction and the non-fiction writing bleed into each other. Especially in the Dostoevsky essay, which basically is a microcosm of Infinite Jest's larger themes (it also explains where DFW got the bonkers idea to basically rewrite The Brothers Karamazov with the Incandenza brothers). And the whole collection is worth buying for the Tense Present essay alone.

 

Anyway, good cast! The le Carré discussion was especially interesting.

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Consider the Lobster may not be my favorite DFW non-fiction collection, but it's what that finally convinced me to tackle Infinite Jest. Most of the essays in Consider the Lobster were written around the same time DFW was finishing Jest, and you can really see how the fiction and the non-fiction writing bleed into each other. Especially in the Dostoevsky essay, which basically is a microcosm of Infinite Jest's larger themes (it also explains where DFW got the bonkers idea to basically rewrite The Brothers Karamazov with the Incandenza brothers). And the whole collection is worth buying for the Tense Present essay alone.

 

Anyway, good cast! The le Carré discussion was especially interesting.

 

I'm glad you feel the Le Carre discussion was interesting because I basically wanted to re-record it immediately after we wrapped because I feel like I so fully squandered my chance to say anything interesting about that book. Jesus.

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I'm glad you feel the Le Carre discussion was interesting because I basically wanted to re-record it immediately after we wrapped because I feel like I so fully squandered my chance to say anything interesting about that book. Jesus.

 

I can understand that. There's so much to talk about with these two books, and there's only so much you can say about TSWCIFTC without completely spoiling the ending. But having just finished both TSWCIFTC and TTSS, I thought the discussion was a great overview of le Carre. Even though I strongly disagree with the idea of reading Spy before Tinker Tailor.

 

Also, wanted to add that I had the exact same experience with looking through a library of my grandfather's books (including the detail of half of the books being in Italian) but in my version, the particular book I focused on was The Name of the Rose. I eventually inherited that first edition copy from him. The book (and Eco in general) have this mythic place in my memories of my grandfather, and it was a surreal experience to actually sit down as an adult and read Eco's books.

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Now I'm doubly excited to listen to this cast! I love Dirk Gently, and I very recently finished Tinker, Tailor as the first le Carre novel I've read. I will be interested in hearing your perspective on reading order, because that was the very next book I was thinking about reading from him.

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I appreciate this summer read cast, guys. If I come across some Le Carré, I'll pick it up. It got the Remo Bump.

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Amazed that you guys didn't mention the "Authority and American Usage" essay, which is my favorite by far. An amazing piece of rhetoric that is itself about rhetoric.

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Amazed that you guys didn't mention the "Authority and American Usage" essay, which is my favorite by far. An amazing piece of rhetoric that is itself about rhetoric.

 

That and his essay on David Lynch are my two favorite pieces of DFW non fiction.

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Amazed that you guys didn't mention the "Authority and American Usage" essay, which is my favorite by far. An amazing piece of rhetoric that is itself about rhetoric.

 

God, I meant to. This whole episode is an elephant graveyard of things people with they talked about. 

 

DFW's Roger Federer expose is also incredible. 

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When I saw the list of books discussed, I knew immediately that Dirk Gently was going to be Jake's book, and I wasn't disappointed.

 

I think the thing that is most interesting about DGHDA is its playing with the absurd. Yes, you can talk about how its theme of holism is matched by its structure and wacky zaniness, but I really do just love its ridiculousness. It trusts the reader, too, to follow along and keep up, and it's always as though the reader is in on the joke -- everything is ridiculous, nothing is ever ridiculed, as it were.

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Dirk Gently is actually my favorite Adams book! I haven't listened to this episode, as I'm still fifty behind on the book club. (I'm finally getting around to reading Telegraph Avenue; don't judge me; I like it so far; I didn't before; that's why I stopped.)

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Good episode guys. I especially liked the le Carre discussion, although I disagree with Chris somewhat about the effect of the books relating to each other. The "George Smiley" who appears in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold  has so little to do with the Smiley from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that I really don't think one's impression of the latter would be harmed by reading the former first. Sure, you'd have some idea about who Smiley and Control are, and what the Circus does, but you wouldn't know anything about Smiley's relationship with Ann or Haydon or Karla or Connie, nor would you know anything about Peter Guillam or Ricki Tarr. Those are the important characters to the novel and le Carre still does a brilliant job of making their stories and relationships confusing and ambiguous. Reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold  first wouldn't change that.

 

Also, while I'm definitely more into book series and lore and stuff than Chris is, I really have to recommend that you read Smiley's People. It's a brilliant story that hits on that same ambiguity and resignation of Tinker, Tailor but in a much more personal way. It's a great way of closing out Smiley's story and really worth reading.

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Dirk Gently has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 serial staring Harry Enfield. I have no idea of its quality or availability, just that the BBC have your back covered whether you want Adams or le Carre.

Also nobody in the UK pronounces le Carre like its a French name, Chris's pronunciation always confuses me for half a second.

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Dirk Gently has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 serial staring Harry Enfield. I have no idea of its quality or availability, just that the BBC have your back covered whether you want Adams or le Carre.

Also nobody in the UK pronounces le Carre like its a French name, Chris's pronunciation always confuses me for half a second.

 

Well he chose to put the accent on there!! 

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Never listen to British pronunciation of names. You don't wanna know what they make of Van Gogh.

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Dirk Gently has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 serial staring Harry Enfield. I have no idea of its quality or availability, just that the BBC have your back covered whether you want Adams or le Carre.

Also nobody in the UK pronounces le Carre like its a French name, Chris's pronunciation always confuses me for half a second.

 

Just John Le Car? Because that's how I've been pronouncing it in my brain since I read the books.

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Dirk Gently has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 serial staring Harry Enfield. I have no idea of its quality or availability, just that the BBC have your back covered whether you want Adams or le Carre.

Also nobody in the UK pronounces le Carre like its a French name, Chris's pronunciation always confuses me for half a second.

To the first: it's fantastic. An absolutely brilliant adaptation.

To the second: uh, yeah they do? I'm in the UK and read it as it is written :P

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Chris: Have you read any Graham Greene? I really, really recommend it as a counterpoint to Le Carre (the two are by far my favorite authors in that "genre", although I think they both escape the genre at times).

 

The Human Factor is a great place to start - it's a book that's ostensibly about espionage but feels much more like a character piece. It helps if you know anything about Kim Philby.

 

Also, I agree that Spy who came in from the cold is probably a better book than Tinker.

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Jakerodkin, have you also read the second Dirk Gently book, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"? I read that book when I was much younger and occasionally remember vague bits of it, but I didn't know there was a previous Dirk Gently book. I'm still somewhat undecided on whether I enjoy Douglas Adams books very much, but maybe I will check that one out sometime when I feel like a chuckle.

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God, I meant to. This whole episode is an elephant graveyard of things people with they talked about. 

 

DFW's Roger Federer expose is also incredible. 

 

My favorite part of Authority and American Usage is DFW's little altercation with a student of his due to his really blunt college course lecture. It's honestly incredible how this intricate political theater of rhetoric is actually just weaved into a dictionary review. 

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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is the most successful version of a narrative structure that Adams kept trying in most of his later novels, where he lays out a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated events and details and then suddenly ties them all together and brings the book to an end in just a few pages.  Ideally, the reader is supposed to say, "What?  That's the end?  But...oh... [an equivalent of the montage from the end of The Sixth Sense plays in the reader's head] ... I see."

 

His first (published1) experiment with that sort of thing was the business with the Krikkit ball at the end of Life, The Universe, and Everything.  He did an even more drastic version of it in the second Dirk Gently novel (Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul) that I thought didn't work nearly as well, but it's been 20+ years since I read it, so maybe I should go back and see if maybe I just didn't get it.  And then he has some elements of that structure in the end of Mostly Harmless.

 

I think the ending of DDHDA works because he is so fair about demonstrating the "rules" in what you don't realize is just the 'B' plot about Gordon Way. As you're being shown explicitly what happens to Way, there are plenty of clues that the same thing is happening in a bigger way in some of the other plot threads.

 

I also think he does a good job making the Bach gag work by having so many places where people are talking about classical music where Bach's name is almost conspicuous by it's absence (the college radio programming, Susan's cello repetoire, the [spoiler redacted]'s dissatisfaction with Vivaldi, all the talk about the relationship between math and music), as well as the way it paralells a simlar anomaly regarding Coleredge.  There's a whole lot of very fine parallelism in the structure of the book (the oddly rationalized actions of Richard's cat burlary, Reg's magic trick, and then Michael's

) that makes it satisfying to re-read multiple times.  I'm not at all surprised Jake keeps coming back to it.  That, and the sheer density of amusing ideas and gags.  I love Dirk's scam of getting people to believe lies by vehemently denying that they are true.

 

(I think the main reason I've really noticed Adams's use of this narrative structure is from realizing that Neil Stephenson keeps trying and failing to do the same thing at the end of his novels, most eggregiously in The Diamond Age.  I think he comes closest to pulling it off at the end of Anathem, but I know a lot of people think he fumbled the end of that one as well.)

 

1Jake pointed out that DDHDA is based on a draft of some Dr. Who episodes Adams had been sitting on for a while

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Oh, and regarding what Jake said about DDHDA having occasional moments of deep insight among the silliness, this is one of my favorite bits from any Douglas Adams book:

 

[Horses] have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

 

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

 

 

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Jakerodkin, have you also read the second Dirk Gently book, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"? I read that book when I was much younger and occasionally remember vague bits of it, but I didn't know there was a previous Dirk Gently book. I'm still somewhat undecided on whether I enjoy Douglas Adams books very much, but maybe I will check that one out sometime when I feel like a chuckle.

 

Teatime is another good book. I'm surprised that someone would be on the fence about Douglas Adams books, but even if you don't think they're humorous I think they're important. He's a great, if scatterbrained at times author, and so much of his work has found its way into every piece of popular culture. The DIrk Gently books are much less going for cheap laughs, and more about building plot and tension and sometimes it's funny.

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This thread seemed like the best place to put this:

 

I just finished reading the first Dirk Gently book and overall I feel let down by the experience. This was the first time I've ever read a Douglas Adams book, and I'm fully willing to admit that I probably would have loved this book if I was 10 years younger. As it stands, the whole thing failed to connect with me, especially at the end. The first 200 pages or so are really fun; just enjoyable to read. If the book had stayed contained like it is for the first two-thirds, my opinion would be much more positive. But the plot just explodes into a zany madness (ghosts, now time travel, now time traveling ghosts, now time traveling alien ghosts!!) that never felt justified. I can see the connections and I get what the "joke" is supposed to be, but that kind of absurdity for absurdity's sake doesn't really appeal to me. The leap from a holistic detective who sees the connections in the universe (which is what I wanted the whole book to be about) to space ghosts was just too much for me take. What was straightforward to the characters was flummoxing to me, and what flummoxed them felt so painfully telegraphed while I was reading.

 

The worst example of this happened when everyone is surprised that helping ghost Michael will undo human creation. Once they established that this ghost spent eons roaming around Earth before humans even showed up, I knew that's where it was going. I just can't believe that Dirk, who could make the seemingly illogical leap to time travel, couldn't also see that conclusion.

 

I haven't listened to the cast yet, but just reading through the thread and seeing people mention this book started off as a Dr. Who script doesn't surprise me. I definitely got that vibe while I was reading, and it's probably another reason I ended up having a lukewarm reaction to this story. All this aside, I'm still happy that I read the book. I honestly did enjoy the majority of it, and I even laughed out loud at some of the better witticisms that Adams likes to drop. Ultimately though, it's just not a book for me and my tastes. I am looking forward to relistening to the cast and hearing Jake's opinion of this book because I'm sure it'll help me think through some of my fuzzier criticisms.

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