Books I Read in 2025 - Catch-up!

My reading got a little side-tracked as the year went on, largely due to some other interests and problems taking up my time.  Nevertheless, I was able to work my way through the following books, one way or another.  Perhaps they are an odd group, compared to what I've been reading lately, but sometimes when the mood strikes to read something specific, you follow it, you know?

Call for the Dead (1961)
by John le Carré

After enjoying so many other books in the universe of George Smiley and the Circus, I decided to check out the first one, which is also le Carré's first novel, period.  It was such a compelling read that I ended up finishing it two days after I started!  While it's a much simpler story, featuring only a handful of characters, it made for a fascinating mystery thriller and provided some of the early foundations that le Carré would build upon later.

In this one, George Smiley is tasked with interviewing Samuel Fennan to make sure he isn't a traitor to United Kingdom's Secret Service.  The interview goes well, and Smiley marks him clear of any issues (despite Fennan having spent some time as a communist in college a few decades earlier).  However, the next morning, Fennan is discovered dead with a suicide note, saying that his reputation is ruined and he can't go on dealing with everyone else's suspicions.  This surprises Smiley, and when he speak's with Samuel's wife Elsa, she reports that Samuel was very upset by the interview, despite George assuring Samuel directly that everything will be fine.  Then, during the interview with the wife, her phone rings, and George suggests he takes it, as his superiors did mention that they might call him there.  However, when he picks up the phone, he instead gets a wake up call for the dead man that was set up the night previous.  The wife tries to explain that it was for her, but Smiley doesn't believe her, setting off a murder mystery for him to unravel.

The first thing I noticed was that this book was much faster paced (and shorter) than the ones I had read before.  After a few chapters, the story just dives right in, and while there are a few moments where Smiley gets to think, the whole thing has such a massive sense of forward momentum that I couldn't put the thing down!  We also are also introduced to a few of the regulars, such as Smiley's infamous wife Ann, his sidekick Peter Guillam, and a big introduction for Inspector Mendel, who goes with Smiley to get to the bottom of this.  He show up in the later books, but in a much smaller capacity, so it was a delight to see Mendel take up so much space, casing the streets and questioning mooks for clues, especially when Smiley ends up in the hospital for a while.  However, because the story was much more plot focused, there wasn't a strong theme beyond the pain of seeing what you built become a problem for you down the line.

Overall, while I enjoyed the book, it clearly doesn't have the density or atmosphere he would establish with later books, reading more like a brisk airplane novel.  However, it is fascinating going back to this one to see where Smiley's (and le Carré's) career started and picking up on the themes and characters that he would expand upon later.  While it's not his best, it could certainly work as a great starting point to get into le Carré's books and his dense world of intrigue and spycraft.

A Murder of Quality (1962)
by John le Carré

Right after I finished Call for the Dead, I jumped right into the next Smiley mystery.  In the span of the series, this one is definitely the black sheep, as it has very little to do with the Circus or Cold War intrigue.  Instead we're given a rather straight-ahead murder mystery taking place in a very peculiar part of rural England.  While the novel does give us a bit of a different side of Smiley, as he's in a very different environment, I found this one to be less satisfying.

Ailsa Brimley is the editor for a magazine that often gets letters from its regular readers, and when one sends a message about how she thinks her husband is going to kill her, she gets worried.  As she once worked under George Smiley as one of his agents during the war, she decides to reach out to him and have him go check on her.  He agrees, but when he gets to the town of Carne, he's too late, and she's dead.  At first, Smiley pursues this mystery mostly as a favor, but eventually, he seeks out justice for his own reasons as he learns more about the victim's circumstances.

I think one of the reasons why I struggle with this novel is its emphasis on the society of the small English town, and likely leans into subtleties that may be obvious to British readers, but I feel get a little lost when you don't know the context quite so well.  Much is made of the local public school, with its staunch, old-fashioned attitudes, especially as those who work there have an incredible amount of arrogance over the rest of the people in the area, leading to quite a bit of social tension (at the crossroads of which is where our victim found herself, figuratively).  It doesn't help that many of the principle actors seem to be pretty double-faced, so Smiley has to weave his way through various gatherings and conversations in order get to the bottom of the case, forcing him to rely on his ability to read people than on deductive logic.  While there are some clues to follow, the novel focuses on this atmosphere so much that it kinda chokes the book.

Still, it wasn't a bad read, as le Carré remains a solid writer.  I just kind of wish the ending didn't lean so hard into implications and maybe tried to explain things better, but again, maybe I'm just too American to really understand it all.  From here, le Carré goes straight to The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which I reread (largely because it was part of a three-in-one book with the first two, which is a different one from the other three-in-one where I first read that spy novel classic).  Rereading that has been pretty fun, as not only knowing the end from the beginning makes it easier to pick up the clues, but there are quite a few references to Call for the Dead, which I hadn't known before.  In any case, le Carré would go on from here to become one of the greatest spy novel writers, but it's clear to see he started from a pretty good place with these two books.

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While I don't want to necessarily list the books, this past year I did pick up an interest in classic mythology.  Somehow, the old tales were calling to me, for one reason or another, and I ended up reading a few books about these things.

First was Norse mythology.  This was largely because I was listening to a lot of Scandinavian metal bands, and they often had references to their folklore and myths, and I felt I was missing some necessary context.  As it turns out, there really is only a handful of tales, largely available through Christian scholars recording the culture of the area.  Consequently, this does put a bit of a barrier between the modern-day reader and the original versions of these tales, as these writers were often shifting these tales and their themes to better fit a Christian context.  Nevertheless, the tales themselves are still pretty entertaining, if largely because the Norse pantheon is a pretty wild crowd.  Loki in particularly seems to shift allegiances at the drop of a hat, while Odin and Thor, despite being quite powerful, seem almost haphazard in their success, winning by luck as much as their talents or powers.  There are a few themes, largely because of the Nordic lands being so difficult to live in, as things like fate and the futility of changing the future are pretty common.  Ragnarok in particular presents a rather curious cosmological puzzle about how things end (and restart).  Still, they made for an entertaining set of tales and gave me a better idea of what those songs were talking about.

I also read the Epic of Gilgamesh.  I'm not quite sure where I got it, but I found I had a very small book that was barely over 100 pages, half of which was dedicated to explaining the tales and their background.  Again, there is only so much to go on, as what we have comes from sets of tablets that seemed to have woven a handful of tales together into a single continuity.  The tales themselves are okay, mostly grounded in the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.  While there are some decent heroics, the story soon becomes a quest where Gilgamesh (distraught by the death of Enkidu) seeks the secret to eternal life, only to come home empty handed and with the lesson that man was not meant to live forever.  Again, fate and futility raise their heads.  (I think this is also common in a lot of Greek and Roman mythology as well.)  Reading about them led me to some mythologists that make this set of tales a kind of origin point for heroic storytelling, from Homer's epics to Biblical tales.  

Another field of myth I started getting into was the Celtic tales, things like the Ulster Saga and the Mabinogion.  I haven't gotten too far, but they've been rather curious reads as well.  Mythological Ireland seemed to have gone through a lot of phases before settling into the dark ages of mankind, with a handful of adventurers often having to go to great lengths to even find anything supernatural.  So far, there's also been a lot of pettiness between various lines of royalty, as deals and negotiations go sour and characters sabotage each other.  I'm not sure if I've picked up on any major themes, but sense that the magical is just on the fringes of our senses feels very Irish to me.

Well, that should wrap things up for 2025.  I don't know how much reading I'll do in 2026, but I know I've got my finger in more than a dozen books, so if I ever finish any, I'm sure to write about them at some point.  I probably should try to do more with the blog, but I've made that promise before.  However, I'm certain to have more things to share as I continue reading.