Joint Book #3: The Night Manager

This is not the version I have.
I just like tigers.

Dear Jenny,

We chose this book back in the comments of this post when we decided to do four shared books this year -- this is our third (the others were The Sandman #1-20 and On Beauty). I diverted from our normal numbering scheme because I have not quite finished my #6 (finally fell behind with Roald Dahl) and you're on #8. So I've called it "Joint Book #3," as you can see.

So... why this book? Well, my grandfather was a big reader. Like... stacks of books all over the house, all the time (sound familiar?) I never saw him without a book tucked under his arm or by his side. He read all kinds of books (as you'll recall, Tess was one of his favorites) but he loved the spy/thriller/mystery genre most of all... and John le Carré was at the top of that list. This is not a genre I usually (or ever) read, but since it was on that original Top 100 list, this has gotta be one of the good ones.

It's set in 1991, which means... pre-easy-access-Internet and pre-mobile-phones-everywhere. I look forward to how they perform their spy antics without those forms of communication!

Discussion Schedule

Here's our schedule for reading and discussing the book -- the first three are Skype dates and the final one is in person. (Yay!)

• July 24: Chapters 1-8
• July 31: Chapters 9-16
• Aug 7 (maybe push to Monday, Aug 10? We'll talk.): Chapters 17-24
• Aug 14: Chapters 25-31  

So we'll chat about the first 8 chapters this Friday. 

Some Random Facts

"John le Carré" is a pen name. Before becoming an author, he worked for British Intelligence and The Night Manager was his first "post-Cold War" novel. He's got a pretty terrific "About" page on his site -- check it out.

The Night Manager going to be made into a miniseries in 2016. It got green lit in January 2015, so I'm pretty sure they saw it on our blog and thought it was a good idea -- why else would they dig up a 22 year old book to make into a new miniseries, right? Heh.

This might explain why you were unable to find a copy of it -- they're probably phasing out old versions and will soon be selling new ones with the actors on the cover (doesn't explain the lack of Kindle version, though...)

Speaking of the cover -- I wish I had the tiger version pictured above. But mine looks like this.

All right! Let's get reading -- are you a regular spy novel reader? I think this is my very first!

love,
kelly