It even made it on the BBC website how much of an alcoholic Bond is!
James Bond is an ‘impotent drunk’
Doctors sat and worked out he had 50 units of alcohol in one day in From Russia With Love
Talk about a liver of steel!
I gave my copy to a friend with Scandinavian grandparents or else I’d send it to you. It’s a big fat doorstop of a book but it reads like popcorn.
Be sure to get the Nunnally translation. I’ve heard that the earlier translation is quite clunky.
Just one more way James Bond is not like you and me… or any other human being, for that matter.
I listened to the first few books a few months ago and came away puzzled that they were as popular as they are. Bond is a terrible secret agent, in that his enemies almost always figure out who he is within the first few chapters. And he rarely does anything particularly clever, he basically just charges in and relies on his plot armor to ensure that he’ll survive against however many bad guys he goes up against.
I just finished Wolf Hall, a historical fiction novel about Thomas Cromwell. It was alright. Kinda repetitive, and Cromwell is being depicted as being a little too modern, and a little too much of a white hat (plus as with all historical fiction that take place with well known characters, it has the problem that the readers know how everything is going to turn out). But the characters and the dry humor was kind of fun, so I might still pick up the sequel.
Did you know he had a submarine named after him?: USS Will Rogers - Wikipedia
Just finished Roy Jenkins’s Afternoon on the Potomac?, a 1972 collection of his lectures at Yale about America’s diminished (he expected) global role as the Vietnam War drew to a close. A short, rather arid book, and not very prescient at all.
Despite that, next up for me is Jenkins’s 1974 collection of short British and American political bios, Nine Men of Power, including Keynes, RFK and Lord Halifax, among others.
I just started a book I tried to read about 30 years ago, but gave up on because I couldn’t follow it: A Clockwork Orange.
It seems a whole lot easier now, though I’m not sure why.
So far this month I’ve read two Asey Mayo mysteries, two Gideon Oliver mysteries, and a ‘1632’ book. Now I’m reading another ‘1632’ book, 1636: Seas of Fortune (by Iver Cooper), and the library has another Gideon Oliver and another Asey Mayo waiting for me to pick them up tomorrow.
Should’ve added, I’m also still browsing through Asimov’s commentaries on Shakespeare.
Enjoy the ultra-violence and the in-out, in-out, little droog. Also, if you’ve seen the film, I’m always curious to hear what you think of the book’s ending vs. the film’s.
IIRC, the book has two different endings as well, depending on the publication run.
I can second this. Back in October, I had this observation:
They’re not really different endings. The American publisher omitted the last chapter, which Burgess wasn’t too happy about but he needed the money.
Personally, I prefer the original with all 21 chapters, I feel it wraps it up nicely.
Many thanks to whoever recommended Hollow City by Dan Wells. I’m about halfway through and am stunned at what he’s done. It’s from the POV of a young man who may or may not be a paranoid schizophrenic. And there’s humor. It’s amazing.
Agreed - lucky, and stupid.
I finished From Russia With Love last night. Very exciting, except Bond is, again, an idiot. Why on earth do they waste four days on the Orient Express? Grab the Spektor machine and the girl, hop on the first flight from Istanbul to Paris, and never mind what Tatiana says - if she won’t defect without the romantic train trip, then knock her on the head and take the machine (and her, I suppose) anyway. It would have saved Kerim Bey’s life.
On the other hand, the whole British Secret Service suffers from a similar lack of IQ. They can smuggle a whole periscope into the basement of the Russian embassy, but not a microphone. I’d rather hear what they say than see what they look like, myself, and I don’t think that’s just me. And the Russians are nearly as dim. They don’t notice a mouse hole with a lens behind it in their own conference room? Or rather, they notice it to the point that they put a mouse trap into it, but not to the point of boarding up the mouse hole. And how did Kerim Bey get the mouse trap out of the way so he could see thru the periscope?
And the final scene of the confrontation between James Bond and Rosa Klebbs is silly. Klebbs doesn’t bring a regular gun - she hides one in a telephone that fires from a bell switch. How about just tucking a Luger into her undershorts? And why doesn’t she kick Bond with her poisoned shoe while they are fighting instead of waiting, and trying to stab him with poisoned knitting needles?
I did like the final line where Fleming thought he was killing Bond off forever. Maybe it would have been more dramatic to kill Bond on the train, either to kill Grant or sacrifice himself to blow up the booby-trapped Spektor machine. Probably good he didn’t - too irrevocable.
Also read Bill O’Reilly’s Pinheads and Patriots, which was much as you would expect it to be. No particularly stunning insights.
The other book I read I cannot remember the name. It was a study of C.S. Lewis’ work on the BBC during WWII, from which Mere Christianity came. This book too did not give much by way of insight into much of anything. Although it did inspire me to find the only surviving recording of C.S. Lewis’ voice. He sounds pretty much like I expected him to, except with less brogue.
Let’s see what New Releases at the library has for me.
Regards,
Shodan
Yay, I think that was me! 
I don’t know if you’ll like the ending, but I did enjoy the ride.
Yeah, he sounds what I expected him to as well. Except I didn’t think his accent was so “veddy, veddy propah.”
While we’re on the topic of James Bond - I listened to the audiobook version of ***Doctor No***last month. This is, of course, the novel the first Bond movie was based on (but the 6th Bond novel), and EON Productions remained relatively true to the book, IMHO.
Sure, they changed the island from a guano production site to a bauxite mine, but that’s understandable :D. And I don’t think they could have filmed the torture test that Bond goes thru, at least not in 1962 (from both a technical and moral standpoint). However, I do wish they had kept more of the characterization of Honey(chile) Ryder - who was the most well-rounded, independent Bond girl yet. While Ms. Andress was quite lovely (no chance of showing her with a broken nose!) and competent in the role, she was a pale copy of the Honey I came to admire in the novel.
This is Bond’s second mission in Jamaica, and it was nice to see him work with Quarrel again (even though it ended badly). It was supposed to be an easy case, as Bond had nearly died at the end of From Russia With Love and was sent to investigate the disappearance of the local contact as a “rest cure”; tho Bond himself found it a bit insulting. It was interesting to see some friction between Bond and M (something we didn’t really see in the films until Dench came along). I also was impressed with the backstory provided for Doctor No - his history with a Chinese Tong and his punishment leading him to seek power via secrecy. This was pretty much skimmed over in the film in favor of associating him with SPECTRE.
I’d definitely agree with Shodan and Max Torque in that Bond makes some stupid mistakes/decisions and has stupendous luck, but I found this outing quite enjoyable and will probably return to the novel again (along with the film). I’m quite looking forward to Goldfinger next!
Right now I’m a little over half-way through Robert Wilson’s (the guy who did the Spin trilogy) “Burning Paradise.”
Set in the near future the world is about to celebrate its hundredth anniversary of “Armistice Day” and a century of relative peace and prosperity. But, who, or what, is behind this softening of the world’s belligerency? Is there something more sinister going on?
So far it’s pretty decent. It moves along at a pretty good clip and I love alternative history.
Speaking of Dan Wells, has anyone read his Partials Series? Partials, Isolation, Fragments & Ruins? I have them on my to read list about 25 books down and was wondreing if maybe I should move them up or push them further down the list.
There’s at least one huge difference between film and novel, and it’s always bothered me (about the film). Bond is imprisoned in a cell with conspicuously HUGE ventilation ducts – big enough for a person to crawl through. (Although a staple of movies, I don’t think I’ve ever seen heating/Ventilation ducts big enough for a person to walk through.) They’re protect by high voltage, but still – who the hell puts such a convenient escape mode in a prison cell? Bond is able to defeat the HV by banging the cover off with his shoe.
then he crawls through the ducts in his escape. He is threatened by excessive heat (he has to cover his hands with strips from his clothing – WTF? Then he gets inundated with seawater – SEAWATER!! In a Ventilation Duct!!
Damn! You don’t want to be an HVAC guy on no’s island.
In the book, this makes some kind of sense – the easy "escape, the Awful Things That Happen in the Duct – they’re all obstacles placed to torment Bond. he’s watched all the time that he’s in the duct, and he knows it. It’s not really an escape at all.
But that can’t be the case in the film – nobody’s watching him, and he DOES escape. The whole sequence makes zero sense.