I’m working my way through Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels in publication order. Right now I’m on For Your Eyes Only. And I’ve gotta say, so far, the Bond of the books is way, way luckier than the Bond of the movies. In the books he scrapes by far too often on his frequent supernatural luck. It’s kinda disappointing after knowing the “nobody does it better” Bond for so long. Still, the books are entertaining, if for nothing else for their painstaking blow-by-blow accounting of tense struggles between Bond and the villains at mundane pursuits: the baccarat game with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, the bridge game with Hugo Drax in Moonraker, the golf game with Goldfinger.
The worst part is that book-Bond seems to be aware of his plot-armour and plan around it. He’ll put him self in dangerous situations, where by any logic he should die, but he does it anyway’s because he knows he’s the hero of the series and so he can just waltz into the villains lair knowing that stuff will end up breaking his way and when the dust settles, Ian Fleming will make sure he’s won the day.
How those books ended up as popular as they are is a mystery to me.
Finished a great read, On Sal Mal Lane, by Ru Freeman. It’s a novel set during the Sri Lanka insurgencies of the early 1980s, framed by the activities of several families of children living in the capital. It was really, really nice writing, and I was a little intimidated at first because, knowing very little about Sri Lankan politics, I was worried it would be hard to follow, but that wasn’t bad at all.
And a YA novel, All Our Yesterdays, which is time travel and a little teen romance. I think this would be a good one for teen readers who enjoy things like the Divergent series. It was fine, nothing particularly memorable.
Huh. Also the title of an old Star Trek episode, which is a time-travel romance: All Our Yesterdays | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Just finished Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin tonight - an interesting, gossipy account of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Recommended for any political junkie. There are two paragraphs about an Obama campaign rally which I actually attended, which was a nice surprise.
I’ve also made some good progress recently on Roy Jenkins’s big but very readable Churchill. I’m up to 1943, and Churchill is doing his best not to be seen by FDR and Stalin as the junior partner in their wartime alliance. I hadn’t realized before that Churchill’s own domestic political standing was occasionally in danger - there were two major parliamentary debates in the first few years of the war focusing on how badly the British military was doing, and how much Churchill was personally to blame. He survived both times, but not unscathed.
A big reason for the James Bond books’ popularity was President Kennedy daying how much he enjoyed them.
I’m doing the same with the audiobook editions, but have only gotten as far as From Russia, With Love. It’s been interesting to compare the films (which I have more familiarity with) to the novels; I’d agree with both of your observations as well.
Am currently listening to Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; a re-read before getting into the second and third novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. Not quite as disturbingly prescient as Handmaid’s Tale, but it still has its uncomfortable real-world moments.
I’ve also been re-reading Cryptonomicon via Kindle - while I’d prefer to dedicate great swathes of time to this Neal Stephenson novel (which it richly deserves IMHO), its episodic nature is lending itself reasonably well to dipping in & and out of it over the past couple of months.
Library-wise - just finished The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. I would have preferred a bit more hard science, but it’s a nice overview of the power of story and narrative. I do kind of agree with Le Ministre de l’au-delà’s review comparing Gottschall not-so-favorably with Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitin, but it was still worth the library read.
Finding myself quite engaged by Stefan Bachmann’s The Whatnot, the second in his Victorian-era urban fantasy series. It carries over some of the characters from The Peculiar, while giving us new characters to become entranced by. If you liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, consider giving these books a shot.
Ugh. It flunked my 50-page rule. Didn’t like it at all.
I finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane; liked it a lot. It seemed very much like a kid’s book to me except for one or two scenes. A reviewer over at Goodreads suggested that it was marketed as an adult book because it helps if the reader is old enough to be nostalgic for childhood. Maybe.
I’m just starting Wally Lamb’s new book, We Are Water. So far, it’s got a lot of eye-rollingly pretentious talk about art, but I’ve really enjoyed some of his previous stuff, so I’ll hang in there.
Having seen and enjoyed both the Swedish and American movies based on it, over the weekend I raced through John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, an intriguing story of bullying, despair and vampirism in early-Eighties Sweden. Very reminiscent of Stephen King’s style. Next up: Lindqvist’s short story “Let the Old Dreams Die,” a mini-sequel or epilogue.
It’s been a book-finishin’ weekend at my place. I finished A Tale of Two Cities which took the bad taste of Little Goody-Two-Shoes out of my mouth. Two Cities is my favorite Dickens novel, so I was relieved to read that one after the absolute worst one. I also finished Barbara Hambly’s *Dragonsbane *which I also love. Emily Dickinson managed to redeem herself from high school English textbooks with The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, and Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old is finally done and back on the shelf. Just a little while ago I returned The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying to the library after first adding it to my wishlist.
Despite all this finishing, the book pile has not gotten any smaller.
Amen to that! 
My Imminent ToRead pile has 8 library books vying for my attention with recent purchases (Song of the QuarkBeast and *Unholy Night *) as well as various recent Kindle acquisitions (those Daily Deals are such a temptation!) … an embarrassment of literary riches!
I picked up My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places from the local library as I’m a fan of Mary Roach and **DungBeetle **mentioned it in last month’s thread. As noted on the cover, it’s a Readers’ Digest publication, and is a compilation of essays Roach wrote for the magazine.
If you’re looking for the spirit of scientific exploration Roach showed in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex or Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, you will be sadly disappointed. The title should have been “My Domestic Planet”, as the bulk of the book discusses her relationship with her husband and their various quirks and foibles.
While her offbeat sense of humor carries over into this material, the outsider observations Roach was able to make in her previous books (and the occasional snark) are pretty much nonexistent. If Roach was aiming at being a modern-day Erma Bombeck (and considering the audience, I wouldn’t be surprised), she succeeded, but it’s not the kind of writing I expect from her and I was a bit disappointed.
Recommended as a library read for light, domestic humour - tho IMHO, any of the 3 books mentioned above would be a better use of your time, if not quite adhering to the topic.
I’m reading Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh. It’s a 700-page monster, and so far I really like it, better than I liked her Downbelow Station. Both novels were Hugo winners in the 1980’s, and they’re set in the same universe. This one has got a fascinating depiction of a society which creates clones who are educated and conditioned for certain professions. It’s also about the attempt to re-create genius: simply cloning a genuis hasn’t worked, so now they’re trying to raise the clone in a duplicate of the social and educational environment of the original. It’s creepy.
I read Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, which was pretty funny, although I’m familiar with only a little of the literature it’s parodying. I think I will enjoy recalling elements of the book (“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”) more than I enjoyed reading it cover to cover.
You might like Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil and Nancy Freedman’s Joshua Son of None, both great books which address that point from very different perspectives. The first book is about cloning and raising lots of young Hitlers as part of Dr. Mengele’s last mad Nazi scheme, while the second is about doing so for a martyred American politician who is obviously JFK, although never named as such.
Elanor of Aquitaine, check out the 1990s film of Cold Comfort Farm. I find it encapsulates the feel of the book very well, and is a bit easier for a modern audience to swallow. Features a young Kate Beckinsale as Flora before she got all Hollywood-skanky.
I did a bunch of re-reading lately, which, along with some lingering jet-lag after my Australia trip, has curtailed my book consumption somewhat. But I am finally getting into Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars, which is meaty and enjoyable. Also, the sequel to Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise just hit my Kindle, a pleasant surprise! (The book delivering, I haven’t started it yet.)
Finished A Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin, the first book in his series A Song of Ice and Fire. An excellent read. Funny though, it’s a rather long book, and I noticed a lot of typos in the last hundred pages. It was almost as if the proofreader just ran out of steam or couldn’t finish before the deadline. (I know, I’m a fine one to talk about typos.) The pronunciation of some names I had to guess at, particularly Jaime. I couldn’t believe it was the Spanish HAI-may, so I read it as Jamie in my mind. I’ll have to watch the show. Does the first season correspond to this first book, does anyone know? But again, a very good read, and I look forward to the second book.
But first I shall read an early one by the recently deceased Elmore Leonard: The Moonshine War. Checked it out of the library.
I had no problem with the name Jaime as it’s the exact way I spell mine. Family legend is my parents argued about it and picked the wrong spelling for this red-headed white girl :).
So you pronounce it JAY-me? (And do you too have an incestuous relationship with a twin sibling?)
The November thread is up and running, and can be found here.
Satan, yes, the first season corresponds with the first book.
Thanks! I’ll have to go look it up.