I remember seeing the PBS adaptation back in the 80s, I believe, it was in my parents place so before 86 and after Raiders came out because it had Deholm Elliot in it, which was the reason I watched it. I remember enjoying the satire and the end, which I won’t spoil and feeling a great deal of satisfaction for the happiness of a couple characters… everything else is blank 
Not familiar with that actor, but thanks for the recommendation (and for not spoiling:)). If I ever make it through the novel (I’m thinking it may take me longer to read it than it took CD to write it) I may look into it! Appreciate it.
Finished The Control of Nature, by John McPhee. Fascinating stuff about how governments coped with Mississippi River floods, an eruption in Iceland, and landslides in California. One of the best books I’ve read this year.
Now I’m reading Good Enough to Eat, a novel by Stacey Ballis.
I am reading I Like to Watch a collection of essays by TV writer Emily Nussbaum. I discovered her on Twitter and like her and her writing so I bought her book. It is mostly republished essays but they are new to me mostly at least so far. Even the ones about shows do not watch are interesting.
Concurrently I am reading the Core Rule Book for Star Trek Adventures. I am a weirdo who reads RPG source books for games I will probably never play for fun (I have over a dozen GURPs rule books and have never once played it). It is not cheap but if you are a Star Trek fan it is a fun read. Lots of info about the setting.
I especially like the section where he goes into detail about how the earthquakes, forest fires, the characteristic California flora, and floods and mudslides are all connected in a web of causality that newcomers are completely unaware of. I’d always wondered why there always seemed to be such devastating wildfires in Southern California, and what those weird wide cement basins that the LA river and other watercourses were for (they show up in a lot of movies – Grease, Buckaroo Banzai, Terminator 2, etc.). It’s all the same cycle, which could arguably be much better managed than it is now.
I finished McCulloch’s the Pioneers, then read Amusement Park Rides by Martin Easdown.
I’m now reading Heinlein’s Children, a commentary on and dissection of the Juvenile Novels of Robert Heinlein, written by Joseph T. Major.
On audio, I’m re-listening to James Loewen’s Lies my Teacher Told Me. The section on how kids don’t learn from the examples of Nixon’s and Reagan’s reaches (Watergate, Iran/Contra), and how that might lead to greater abuses of power in the future seems particularly relevant now.
Found this article today, thought it might be interesting to some of you:
The Tao of Sir Terry: Pratchett and Political Philosophy
J.R.H. Lawless
This week I’m reading Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old Happy Dog, by Dave Barry. He can still surprise a laugh out of me. I enjoyed the chapter about the Rock Bottom Remainders; never knew that Warren Zevon had played with them!
Finished Heinlein’s Children over the weekend, now on to Stephen Silverman’s The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spills. I also have the copy of Gilgamesh I picked up several weeks ago as backup.
On audio, I finished re-reading Lies my Teacher Told Me and am now listening to a collection of the works of Mark Twain.
I just finished Westside, a weird noir urban fantasy set in early-20th-century New York. The prose owes a lot to Raymond Chandler, the setting to The City and the City. Overall I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s gonna revolutionize the genre or anything.
Still, it’s nice to read urban fantasy that isn’t set in London.
Just started Licence Renewed by John Gardner. It’s the first in the James Bond book series written by Gardner in the 80’s and 90’s. I’ve read all the original Fleming books, and Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” (which was the only book in a planned series of ghostwritten Bond books after Fleming’s death), but never any of the Gardner books.
Just finished it. It starts out slow and clunky - for awhile I thought it would just be one quotation or diary excerpt after another, with hardly any original content by Meacham himself - but eventually he begins to actually tell the story, and it gets much better. I was surprised to learn that, in the last week or so before he died in April 1945, FDR, mindful of his ill health and waning skills, talked to friends about resigning in 1946 once the United Nations was up and running. It would’ve been the first presidential resignation, had it happened. The section on FDR’s death, and Churchill’s reaction, was quite touching.
Next up: Robert Parker’s 1982 Spenser novel, Ceremony, in which the smartass Boston PI goes looking for a teenage runaway who may have turned to prostitution.
License Renewed isn’t bad, but the next couple of books decline in quality, IMHO, with Icebreaker being the worst Bond novel written by anyone (including Christopher Wood). He got better after that, with some of the next books being pretty good, before he drifted off into “phoning it in” territory.
The Raymond Benson books revived the series at first, but then he got boring, too.
For my money, the two recent effects by Sebastian Faulks (Devil May Care) and Anthony Horowitz (Trigger Mortis), being set at the time of the original novels, capture the spirit and form of the “Classic” Bond best. (I haven’t read Horowitz’ second Bond effort , Forever and a Day, yet.)
Finished Good Enough to Eat, a novel by Stacey Ballis. Meh.
Now I’m reading Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland, by Dave Barry.
How are the movie novelizations that Gardner wrote? I know he did a couple, are they worth reading? I don’t normally read novelizations, but may if they add something to the story.
They’re OK. I’d heard that they were originally going to base the second Dalton movie – License to Kill – on Gardner’s License Renewed, but that clearly didn’t happen. Nevertheless, Gardner did write a novelization of the film (the first Bond film novelization, AFAIK, since Christopher Wood’s James Bond and Moonraker) which did add to the material in the film (for instance, he observes that REAL Stinger missiles wouldn’t miss their targets once locked on – these ones the Bad Guys used must have been training missiles lacking target lock). Gardner also did a novelization for Goldeneye, but I can’t recall it at the moment.
Raymond Benson then “novelized” Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough, and Die Another Day, which was not only his last novelization, but the last one done for any Bond film to date. Benson adapted from the screenplays, and left in material that was cut from the movies, as well as filling in some background on his own.
AFAIK, nobody did any novelizations for the Daniel Craig films. Penguin Books did issue a collection of Fleming’s Bond short stories at the time of the film’s release with “Quantum of Solace” in big letters at the top. (They could’ve done this with For Your Eyes Only and had a pretty good tie-in, but I don’t think they did).
Finished The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy. A fictional, noir account of the infamous Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in January 1947. Ellroy’s own mother would similarly be brutally murdered by an unknown killer in Los Angeles 11 years after the Dahlia, a fact that attracted him to the subject. The first installment in Ellroy’s LA Quintet. It did not take me long to remember that I had actually read The Black Dahlia two or three decades ago. I had completely forgotten. But I did not remember how it turned out, so it still felt sort of fresh.
Next up is The Big Nowhere, more LA noir from James Ellroy. The second of his LA Quartet.
To add: I am sure I have not ready any of the other LA Quintet installments.
I just did a reread of Dune and now I’m onto A Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty. She writes these suburban suspense stories (Big Little Lies was adapted for HBO) and she is quite good at twists and turns and sucking you in.
I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves as part of a break in my ongoing trek to read all the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I recently finished the A Clash of Kings, with A Storm of Swords on deck.