I think The Telling goes cheap on some of the worldbuilding and the satire, which is frustrating, because other parts of the worldbuilding are excellent and when you finally do get a sense of the main character and the person who would be her antagonist in any other novels, there is some genuinely great writing there.
I suspect my affection for the second half overwhelms possible negative aspects of the first half. Also, the first time I read it, I had no idea it was intended as a parody of modern China.
I do remember watching CTHD, some 6 months later, and getting to the end, and being like, Hey!
older spy novels - Alister Mclean. I read him in highschool -- at the same time when I was reading MacInnes. So I don't know if he was very good or not. two titles Circus and Guns of Navarone
Oh, beth, that's right. The 3 macs: MacInnes, McLean and (John D.) MacDonald. Wow, that was a while ago.
Katerina, right.
That's why she loved her son more than all her daughters. It wasn't sexism, it was because her eldest was Borowis'. It's also why the younger son knew somebody had to marry her. Agreed on the slap. In historical context, it's less awful, but it's still pretty awful.
I think the best Fleming novel is Casino Royale -- it suffers least from the recycling of unconscious tropes of the author, and works best in its historical context: one of the villains is a man who spent time in a Displaced Persons camp after the war, so he quite literally has no identity or nationality at all.
Yes yes yes yes yes and more yes. Also? I think it's the saddest of the Bond novels. Bond is betrayed, he can only deal by hardening himself and betraying his own heart. You'll never see him played that way in all those big dumb movies, damnit.
Well, one of the Brosnan movies has him telling a woman that the only way he survives is by not letting himself care, or some such thing.
t /movie natter
Of course, in the movies, he always gets the girl; not so, in the books. For some reason - maybe its graininess of the personal feelings portrayed - the first of the two Timothy Dalton movies came the closest for me, to the way Fleming actually wrote Bond. When Bond is betrayed by his Russian friend, Dalton just smoked his own pain; you could see it fester.
All the fun I had with Sunshine made me seek out other vampire books at the library. Bound in Blood: The Erotic Journey of a Vampire, by David Thomas Lord, seemed like it would be a sure-fire hit. Not so much. It's quite possibly the only vampire book I've ever not been able to finish. The author spent the first fifteen pages or so discussing the lead character rising, dressing, and admiring himself in a mirror. Seriously -- he gets lost in his own magnificence for about an hour. Bad. Really, really bad. <sigh>
Umm, a mirror? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that vamps don't do that.
