I wasn't sure whether to put this in Literary or Movies, but I am pleased to report that The Seeker, the movie once known as The Dark is Rising (but apparently the title of the book it was based upon was jettisoned along with 90% of the plot and 100% of the characterization), is getting panned.

You know, I wish that the BBC had made a nice mini-series out of it instead of this movie stuff.

Oh, very much so, sumi. A miniseries would have been perfectly suited for the pace of the book and would have allowed us to wallow in its mood and atmosphere.

Normally I understand when changes made for movie adaptations of books. But in this case, it really does sound... well, awful. Some changes for crass commercialism are to be expected, but when I actually went and read about some of what they're doing... Yeesh. It sounds like a really bad movie, quite apart from it being an adaptation only in the loosest sense.

I'm tempted to tell my mom all about it, because she loved the books too (and probably reread them more recently than I did) and I find it adorable when she gets her righteous indignation on.

New book recommendation: I Am the Messenger.

Alan Rickman reads Sonnet 130

Gah.

collapses

revives a bit to ask question

Anyone have recommendations for good spy novels? I've just given up on Daniel Silva -- I liked the first bunch of books in the Gabriel Allon series, but the last few have been way over-the-top in the political anvils, and the "lesson" of this latest one seemed to be "Anyone who doesn't think that Muslim radicals are going to take over Europe in the next few decades is hopelessly naive." And, well, no. I've been wanting to read the James Bond books. Anything else you'd recommend?

And on a similar note, I'm in the middle of The Big Sleep and really liking it. Where should I start for more mysteries from that period?

Where should I start for more mysteries from that period?

There are a lot of Red Harvest fans around here.

Spy novels: I'm sure ita has a long list. Depends on whether you want to go towards the literary end with LeCarre or Graham Greene or the pulpier Bond end. I think the Frederic Forsyth books are very good: The Odessa File, Day of the Jackal.

Anything by Chandler is good. The Big Sleep is my favorite of his, but The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye are both also great. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me is fantastic. From an earlier generation, I love all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, which are all short enough to practically be novellas (and his whole list of novels is Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, right? The other works I've read by the guy are all short stories).

The Continental Op is bound as a single work these days. It's fairly obvious a set of discrete stories, though. And yes, that's it for Hammett.

To a large degree deciding what you like about The Big Sleep is what will help with recommendations. I've been having a discussion about noir plots and writers, and realized that we group together a number of writers who are quite unalike. People who like Chandler aren't actually all that likely to enjoy Hammett, if it's Chandler's use of rhetoric they like.

(For the pure crack hit of a locked-room mystery, in lugubrious 1930s style, I recommend Cornell Woolrich, the author of the original Rear Window. )

I don't think I've ever read a spy novel set after about 1980 (nor indeed necessarily published after that date), so I'd be bad at recommendations on that account. Although, really, all those retro-WWII novels are at least unlikely to be politically obnoxious, right? (Although I am clearly an outlier in spy novel taste, because I loathed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. )

People who like Chandler aren't actually all that likely to enjoy Hammett, if it's Chandler's use of rhetoric they like.

Yes, this. I've read all of Chandler a couple of times and love him to death, but (please forgive me, Corwood) I've staggered through the first two chapters of Red Harvest three or four times in the past three years and found myself paralyzed with not caring very much.

Charles Willeford is bleak and hard and cold and heartless and all his novels live in the borderland between noir and lurid-covered trash (though most of them were published on the trash side of the border), and is consequently a great deal of dark ugly fun.