"Minneapolis doesn't seem like a very good place to become an Imperial Japanese Army officer."

[intheattempt]

I promised on tumblr that I'd post the books I'd be reading for my classes. So, here they are for the Cold War spy novel one and the Jazz Lit class.


For the Cold War Spy Novel:

• William Le Queux, Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903)
• Eric Ambler, Cause for Alarm (1938)
• Carmichael Smith (Paul M. A. Linebarger), Atomsk (1949)
• Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (1954)
• Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
• Julian Semyonov, In the Performance of Duty (1963)
• Helen MacInnes, The Double Image (1966)
• John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1976)
• Robert Ludlum, The Materese Circle (1979)
• Frederick Forsyth, The Devil’s Alternative (1979)
• Len Deighton, The Berlin Game (1983)
• John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy (1986)
• Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears (1991)
• Robert Littell, The Company (2002)

We have a lecture every Tuesday and a class discussion every Friday, which I'm really nervous about. I'm reading Atomsk this week. Last Tuesday, we learned about how it was a tradition in MI 5 or 6 for the chief to write in green pen. My friend and I later had a discussion with the professor in which we showed him our Tinker Tailor posters I got at the early screening last semester. We didn't have an extra but we wanted to give him the newspaper ad I'd saved last December and then had nowhere to put it up in my room. When we returned to his office, he was out, so we slipped it under the door with "From Friends" written in Russian in green on a note attached to it. Winners, we are.

For my Jazz Lit class:

• The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 1  (Langston Hughes)
• Dear John, Dear Coltrane  (Michael Harper)
• Corregidora (Gayl Jones)
• The Jazz Poetry Anthology (Sascha Feinstein)
• Howl (Allen Ginsberg)
• Sent For You Yesterday (John Edgar Wideman)
• Jazz (Toni Morrison)
• Leadbelly (Tyhimba Jess)

It's a bit of a bummer that this isn't Jazz Age literature, but the course still looks wonderfully interesting, so I'm still pretty excited about it. With my other two lit classes, though, I'm drowning in reading.