14
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Tildes Book Club - Have you started Dr. No by Ian Fleming?
Moving right along myself.
Links with more information for anyone undecided: LibraryThing:StoryGraph
Content Warnings based on user submissions from StoryGraph.
Plot summary of the previous work in the series (From Russia, with Love) from Wikipedia.
Random story time:
In 4th grade I got really into James Bond. I had played Goldeneye 64 endlessly and was enthralled. I watched the movies and when I went to the library I got the books. It was a bit over my head, but as an AuDHD kid in the 90s people just let it ride.
Except for my teacher.
She saw me reading in class (something I'd keep doing and, despite always having the right answer when called on, teachers always took exception to it) and noticed the book has a scantily clad lady on the cover. Her immediate thought was "this is smut" and she called for a conference with my parents about it.
The story I'm told is that after a confusing discussion on my reading habits everyone agreed that I'd probably be fine but I needed to bring different material to school.
I’m several chapters in and have run into a couple of things I usually encounter with classic sci-fi but don’t remember from when I read Casino Royale.
This book was written in 1957 by an English person, some of the descriptions and term coinages sound really racist to my modern American ears. This refers to describing how characters look as well as referring to groups of people. I’m dancing around it because I’m not comfortable repeating the language used.
I’m maybe 5 chapters in and annoyed at the constant infantilism of women, something really common in books of this era. “A man and a girl,” is used to describe two adults over and over. I’ve gotten used to thinking of Judi Dench as M, so the original M character is jarring. I find that I usually need a mind shift to ignore or accept these attitudes toward women as period normal so I can move past it and focus on the story. If anyone finds they can’t do this, I do NOT recommend Heinlein or Niven.
On the lighter side, there is a lot of bridge (the card game) terminology I’ve had to look up. The phrase “in the middle of a rubber,” made absolutely no sense to me. This helped: Glossary of contract bridge terms. It actually took me a bit to figure out if they were playing bridge or whist. Casino Royale taught me how baccarat is played, this book assumes everyone is familiar with the game.
The ebook anthology volumes for The Original James Bond Collection are all on sale in the US for $4 (not sure about other countries).
Dr. No is in Volume 2 in case anyone’s still interested in picking it up on the cheap.
the Bond books are so much better than the movies.
Dr No by Percival Everett is a great follow-up read to this one.
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I finished it a couple weeks ago and wrote down my thoughts, and then watched the movie. This was my first James Bond book so I'm very interested in everyone's thoughts once the main thread opens.
I have not started, but I'm about to finish a book and have Dr. No on my shelf so I may join in this month! (No need to add me to ping list, I see all of these posts anyway)
I finished last night! I had seen a few James Bond movies but had never read any of the books. It is obviously a product of its time but overall I enjoyed it. Bond's ability to eat a several course meal and down several stiff drinks and then do super spy stuff is pretty funny. I look forwards to hearing folks' thoughts at the end of the month.
I have finished From Russia with Love quite some time ago, Dr. No is still waiting. Maybe I should start reading right now and join you?
It's a great time to get started and we'd be happy to have you, though I will note in case you end up waiting that the discussion topics are evergreen; people are encouraged to post in them whenever they have a thought about the book, no matter how long it's been since the topic was posted.
Should I add you to the pings list?
Well, I'm not that much of a reader, pinging me wpuld be waste of your time. I just saw '"Dr. No" and remembered that was where I ended up with Ian Fleming's books. So you ended nudging me back into reading the series, all by chance. Thanks! I might come back later when I finished the book, but likely just this one time.
Thanks for your kind reply!
Quick update: since the cadence has been a commonly cited issue over in the book club future discussion topic, I'll be postponing the Dr. No discussion topic until the end of October. Possibly even a little longer depending on how everything shakes out.