We're not very well read are we? Top of this page goes back to a post I made three years ago!
people, including myself, have been posting non-Bond-related book reviews over in the James Bond Literature "What are you Currently Reading?" thread https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/46064/what-are-you-currently-reading/
I made a point of bumping this thread (actually Barbel pointed me to it) because I think on-topic Bond-related book discussion should have its own thread, and off-topic non-Bond-related book discussion should be separated ... for example ChrisCoop's mention he just read Colonel Sun might get more back-and-forth going in the Bond related thread, and non-Bond related discussion should not be overwhelming the on-topic discussion
it'd be great if the two threads could get distinct subtitles (eg (BondRelated) and (NonBondRelated)), because otherwise they will continue getting confused
just my zany thought process, probably nobody else thinks theres a need
Asterix And The Chariot Race
story by Jean-Yves Ferri, art by Didier Conrad, translated by Adriana Hunter
original artist and series cocreator Albert Uderzo retired several years back, and picked a pair of younger cartoonists to continue the series, this is the third book by the new team.
Also the first to be translated by Adriana Hunter, as longtime translator Anthea Bell has also retired, When a comic relies so much on wordplay and puns, the translator's job is as important as the artists.
The plot: a corrupt Roman senator has planned a chariot race from the Alps to Vesuvius, to distract the public from the true state of the roads, and barbarians may enter as long as a Roman wins.
This is actually an excuse for Asterix and Obelix to do a tour of Italy outside the city of Rome, something they have never done before, and show some stereotypes of Italians from other regions in the country ... we see Venice, Florence and Naples for example ... the dialog tells us the various Italics are no happier to be part of the Roman Empire than the Gauls.
(I think this is a good idea, Italians have gotten a raw deal out of the Asterix series, previously shown only as Caesar's stooges, while every other country in Europe got a full books worth of attention)
the art looks so similar to Uderzos at first glance you'd never know there'd been a change, though in some places Conrad lapses into a sketchier style, and some tricky compositions Uderzo'd never use.
Ferri's writing seems much too schematic, it does not flow naturally, like he's struggling to fit in the plot, the funny dialog, and the satire, and has notable pacing issues ... the story ends up being one page longer than every other Asterix adventure and still the conclusion is rushed.
____________________________________________________________________________________
I'm thinking of starting a general comics thread, but don't know if anybody else would care except me?
a shorter, different version of this story was in the Silmarillion, and selected fragments were in Unfinished Tales. Son Christopher has spent decades organising his fathers papers, Dad had tried to complete this story a dozen times throughout his lifetime, including as a longform poem, and Christopher finally synthesised what he considers to be the most complete possible version by piecing together various incomplete fragments from across the decades.
This story is set during the Elder Days, the First Age of MiddleEarth. A couple generations after Mortal Men first crossed the mountains from the east (fleeing an evil none will ever speak of), and some families have managed to live side by side with the Elves, and earn their respect. Some interesting philosophical debates spinning out of the differing points of view of a mortal doomed to die vs an immortal elf, who can afford to play the long game and outwait Evil's rise and fall. The hero Turin Turambar is cursed by the enemy Morgoth, but every misfortune he suffers is his own fault, the product of pride and misplaced courage. The last chapters are like those operas where every character gets a drawnout death scene, staggering round the stage still soliliquising, until the stage is a pile of corpses.
Interesting to compare Chistopher Tolkien's lifes work with some discussions we had regarding Trigger Mortis, and the challenge of finishing Fleming's abandoned story ideas. Tolkien Jr really has the opposite problem. Fleming at best would have left behind a few synopses, or writing exercises abandoned after two paragraphs. But Tolkien Sr seemed to have piled up warehouses full of never published abandoned drafts for his middleEarth mythologies, always returning to the same plots and characters but changing them each time and still never finishing them. I gather he submitted someof it as a proposed followup to The Hobbit, but it was rejected so he began a proper sequel instead, yet continued to rewrite this stuff obsessively for his own amusement. Almost like Stieg Larson's Amazing Adventures of Salander and Blomkvist. I'm surprised J.R.R. had any time for teaching classes at Oxford he must have spent so much time on this stuff. And now his son has made a lifelong career just out of putting all the abandoned fragments into publishable form.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,749Chief of Staff
The Charming Killer by M.A. Polash - the best worst book I’ve ever read )
The ‘story’ is crazy, the dialogue is hilarious and it’s just gets sillier and sillier with every turned page - I absolutely loved it for all the wrong reasons
My last book read was 'The hangman's tale'.Memoirs of Syd Dernley,the hangman's assistant.First hand account of the hanging of
some notorious British murderers.
Two previous book's worth mentioning.First John Dickson Carr's The constant suicides' .Carr was undoubtably the master of the locked room type of mysteries.Also wrote as Çarter Dickson'.
The other was Flemings,'For your eyes only',which included 'Quantom of solace'.Picked it up for one Australian dollar.It needed very little knowledge of Bermuda to guess the identity of the Bermudian playboy.I once played cricket against his side.Late 1940's/early 1950's.
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. This is a great book about the life of the composer Dimitri Shostakovitch but written as a novel from his perspective; the terror of living under the Stalin regime and trying to make art and be expressive while always looking behind your back and worrying about being arrested or shot or his family being threatened. You can feel the tension through the pages.
This is a book in the Jack Reacher series. As always it's action-packed, has an interesting mystery and Reacher beats up a large number of people. It's a direct sequel to "61 hours", one of the best Reacher novels.
I think it was a mistake by Tom Cruise to film "Never go back" now. He should have made "61 hours", then "Worth dying for" and finally "Never go back".
If Cruise is human (I said "if"!) he'll be too old as well as too short to play Jack Reacher anymore.
Then someone younger who looks like Reacher can do the remaining novels in cronological order, starting with" The killing floor". Maybe HBO could make it?
I got "Gorbachev - his life and times" by William Taubman in the mail today. I probably won't have time to read it in a long time, but I'm looking forward to it
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,749Chief of Staff
This is a book in the Jack Reacher series. As always it's action-packed, has an interesting mystery and Reacher beats up a large number of people. It's a direct sequel to "61 hours", one of the best Reacher novels.
I think it was a mistake by Tom Cruise to film "Never go back" now. He should have made "61 hours", then "Worth dying for" and finally "Never go back".
If Cruise is human (I said "if"!) he'll be too old as well as too short to play Jack Reacher anymore.
Then someone younger who looks like Reacher can do the remaining novels in cronological order, starting with" The killing floor". Maybe HBO could make it?
I got "Gorbachev - his life and times" by William Taubman in the mail today. I probably won't have time to read it in a long time, but I'm looking forward to it
Dwayne Johnson was up for Reacher once over, until Cruise bought the rights 8-) he’d have been FAR better...all the Reacher books are a decent read.
Pastiche Sherlock Holmes, part of a long series and a perfectly acceptable substitute for the real thing once you've read the originals.
Solar Pons lives at 7b Praed Street with his associate Dr Parker (who narrates the stories), looked after by their long-suffering landlady Mrs Johnson. He's often called upon by Inspector Jamieson to help with cases which have Scotland Yard baffled, and his brother Bancroft holds an influential Government position...
Don't know much about the Reacher books, although they seem to get
a good rep. As for the movies, the first wasn't bad but the Second ...
The first couple are a bit ropey...but readable...they then get stronger before tailing off into mediocrity, still enjoyable but rather absurd...
Completely the same as I've found them tbh, the last one I read was the one where most of the book is set in the car. Not bothered since.
I guess tastes differ I love the Reacher books . Along with Kyle Mills( he took over Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp)and Daniel Silva I get their latest when released.
On balance I probably read more historical fiction though.
Anthony
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,749Chief of Staff
Unquiet Spirits by Bonnie MacBird...her second Sherlock Holmes novel.
Found this book disappointing after her excellent opener - Art in the Blood...this second one just didn’t get going at all for me I hope her third will be better.
Not yet finished, but I'm currently reading Slow Horses by Mick Herron.
This is book one of the Slough House series, about a group of failed spies who are condemned to performing menial intelligence tasks in a dingy building known as Slough House. I've been hearing a lot of great stuff about this series, and from my experience so far I would certainly agree that this is one of the best spy novels around. What really makes it is the characters and the way that Herron creates this grubby little corner of the intelligence world. These are certainly not spy novels in the James Bond mould, more like Len Deighton or Le Carre territory, but in my opinion a lot easier and entertaining to read than Le Carre.
Not a book read, this time. I just heard on the radio that book publishers now employee "sensitivity readers" to proof-read book script for content that may offend minorities.
I'm worried....
For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History, by Sarah Rose. Absolutely top-notch history that's in large part a story of industrial espionage, as Robert Fortune (you'd think the name was made up by a novelist) is sent by the East India Tea Company into forbidden China in the late 1840s to obtain tea plants and learn the proper method of preparing the leaves. Fortune would make three treks into China--in disguise--and emerge with the plants that would become the basis of Darjeeling tea. In addition to the spy elements, it's also a botanical treatise, explaining how tea is cultivated; a study of Imperial trade; and ultimately an argument for how tea helped fuel the modern world economy. I hope to be in London this summer; if so, I have to visit Fortune's onetime haunt of the Chelsea Physic Garden. . .and before that I might have a good cuppa.
The Last Stand by Mickey Spillane. This previously unpublished book has been released in honour of Spillane's 100th birthday anniversary. It's actually 2 books in one or novellas. Spillane was the ultimate pulp fiction author and his Mike Hammer character is justly famous. I am only a few pages in but it's really good if you enjoy this style of writing. Spillane was also an actor of sorts and appeared in one the greatest episodes of Columbo.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The Midnight Line. This the latest in the Jack Reacher series, I am half way through and it's a good one. I prefer the ones where he walks into a small town and finds trouble I am not keen on the flashback books which take place before the first released book The Killing Ground, I know that Reacher won't die in any of them but it is startling obvious he's not going to die in a prequel )
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Macbeth by Jo Nesbø (based on the play by William Shakespear)
A number of contemporary authors working in different generes have been asked to write their versions of the Bard's plays. Nesbø chose Macbeth and it's a good fit. In his Macbeth it take place in an un-named city in Scottland in the 1970's.The city has been in decline since the war, steeped in drugs and unemployment. Macbeth is the commander of the Guard (SWAT) and a reformed drug addict. He is in love with Lady, the owner of one of the two casinos in the city. The story is about the struggle for Macbeth's soul, power over the city and the relationship between Macbeth and Lady.
I found the novel worth reading, but it's not one of Nesbø's best. Even though he hardly quotes Shakespear, the language is at times too stilted and theatrical. If you don't read Shakespear, but would like to familiarize yourself with Macbeth I reccomend reading this book followed by the exellent and much more faithful movie version of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
The Midnight Line. This the latest in the Jack Reacher series, I am half way through and it's a good one. I prefer the ones where he walks into a small town and finds trouble I am not keen on the flashback books which take place before the first released book The Killing Ground, I know that Reacher won't die in any of them but it is startling obvious he's not going to die in a prequel )
Yes I've read and enjoyed the Reacher books even though it has bone crunching violence on the villains.
I'm reading the paperback of A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre. Very absorbing and the story flows quickly about
Peter Guillam being grilled by the powers that be about events 30 years previously.
Took me a while to read (542 pages) but was well worth it. I finished this yesterday. I was wondering why it was so successful and now I know. Very well constructed with good character development and like Fleming at the end of the chapters you can't wait to start the next one. Couldn't wait to watch the film (2009) that I planned to watch over two nights as it goes for almost 3 hours but this too was excellent and watched it in one sitting. Highly recommend both the novel and the film. Will start the Girl who Played with Fire today.
"Everyone knows rock n' roll attained perfection in 1974; It's a scientific fact". - Homer J Simpson
I was put off the sequel to that due to a 'trailer' at the end of the first book describing the sadistic treatment of some poor woman, as if that was meant to draw us in!
The Mammoth Book of Cover Ups
Most of you have a budget bookshop in your local mall with dodgy titles such as this going for £3 or so. This one is another Conspiracies book but actually it's well written and quite sceptical (which annoys the hell out of some Amazon reviewers!). It deals with 100 cover ups or conspiracies in chapters, and affords a credibility rating (Alert Rating) at the end to surmise how likely it is there was a cover up. Pearl Harbor gets a 10, in other words it's taken as read that Roosevelt let it go ahead to propel the US into the war. Others get high ratings, such as the 'murder' of Dr David Kelly, the whistleblower over the Iraq dodgy dossier, a rating that is backed up by a recent book on the subject. Some get 0 such as Holocaust Denial, which is fair enough, though why the Royal Family being lizards gets a '1' suggesting it's marginally more likely, I couldn't say. Disappointingly, 'Elvis Lives' gets a 0 because I'd like to see him tour again.
The author points out that most conspiracies are tarnished by association, the wilder stuff put about by David Icke for instance.
I used to love conspiracy theories before I went back to school and got hip to critical thinking and rigorous scepticism and all that boring stuff. Even then I had classmates who insisted science was a patriarchal conspiracy to kinda sorta totally literally rape the earth.
Still bad logic is always fun. Good exercise for the reasoning chops, I like to come up with a really stupid theory and run with it, fleshing out so many funny details that you really want it to be true. It's just too bad it's now the official mainstream philosophy. Evil self centred scientists out to get rich quick from those lucrative grants, out to ruin the lives of those nice innocent oil men who just want to help the little people, and so on. And somehow, all the scientific advancement that led to the personal computer, the internet, universal access to just about any data you could imagine, has somehow led to counterrational conspiracy logic becoming more popular than ever.
I mean, not to get too political, but Pizzagate? it worked. who cares if its easily debunked, it worked so it is a proven electoral tool that will be recycled next time and will indoobitably work again. It's like Rene Descartes need never have bothered. Silly human race.
The funny thing about this new book is that when it skirts over one conspiracy in just a couple of pages - the faked moon landing, for instance, you think hmmm, okay, so not looking into that one, are we? And why nothing on Scientologists? That said, I'm not sure they or Jehovah's Witnesses are associated with any cover ups really, except the former do cover up their actual beliefs, they are not transparent.
Bond references - it says the moon buggy scene in DAF is a deliberate reference to the fake moon landing conspiracy, and that the inspiration for Q was involved in the Rudolf Hess landing during the war, there are two conspiracies going on there, very interesting. The Q guy was asked by the UK team to make up a duplicate uniform for Hess which he said he thought could only happen if they were going to use a double. Some of it does make your head hurt a bit though...
The book was published in 2007 so is quite out of date.
I just finished this audio book of the latest adventure of Harry Hole. Don't be alarmed by the fact that Harry Hole is happy ( ) at the start of the story, because the first spectacular murder comes along quickly. This time the victims are killed using metal teeth (great idea - perhaps something for the Bond movies? :v )
The final death toll will make up about a quarter of Norway's average yearly number of murders, just like the other books in the series. Harry's son Oleg is at the police accademy and contributes in the investigation for the first time. The plot and atmosphere is solid as usual, but the scene where a certain person confesses could have been taken straight out of a "Colombo" episode. Still, I reccomend "Thirst" to any of Jo Nesbø's fans.
I took Solo with me to Paphos (I wish I hadn't ) it sort of started out ok but it went down hill for me , I thought the writing was lazy and not consistent , example , it says they (Bond and Blessing made love) that was it
Comments
I made a point of bumping this thread (actually Barbel pointed me to it) because I think on-topic Bond-related book discussion should have its own thread, and off-topic non-Bond-related book discussion should be separated ... for example ChrisCoop's mention he just read Colonel Sun might get more back-and-forth going in the Bond related thread, and non-Bond related discussion should not be overwhelming the on-topic discussion
it'd be great if the two threads could get distinct subtitles (eg (BondRelated) and (NonBondRelated)), because otherwise they will continue getting confused
just my zany thought process, probably nobody else thinks theres a need
CJ box craig Johnson etc
story by Jean-Yves Ferri, art by Didier Conrad, translated by Adriana Hunter
original artist and series cocreator Albert Uderzo retired several years back, and picked a pair of younger cartoonists to continue the series, this is the third book by the new team.
Also the first to be translated by Adriana Hunter, as longtime translator Anthea Bell has also retired, When a comic relies so much on wordplay and puns, the translator's job is as important as the artists.
The plot: a corrupt Roman senator has planned a chariot race from the Alps to Vesuvius, to distract the public from the true state of the roads, and barbarians may enter as long as a Roman wins.
This is actually an excuse for Asterix and Obelix to do a tour of Italy outside the city of Rome, something they have never done before, and show some stereotypes of Italians from other regions in the country ... we see Venice, Florence and Naples for example ... the dialog tells us the various Italics are no happier to be part of the Roman Empire than the Gauls.
(I think this is a good idea, Italians have gotten a raw deal out of the Asterix series, previously shown only as Caesar's stooges, while every other country in Europe got a full books worth of attention)
the art looks so similar to Uderzos at first glance you'd never know there'd been a change, though in some places Conrad lapses into a sketchier style, and some tricky compositions Uderzo'd never use.
Ferri's writing seems much too schematic, it does not flow naturally, like he's struggling to fit in the plot, the funny dialog, and the satire, and has notable pacing issues ... the story ends up being one page longer than every other Asterix adventure and still the conclusion is rushed.
____________________________________________________________________________________
I'm thinking of starting a general comics thread, but don't know if anybody else would care except me?
J.R.R. Tolkien
a shorter, different version of this story was in the Silmarillion, and selected fragments were in Unfinished Tales. Son Christopher has spent decades organising his fathers papers, Dad had tried to complete this story a dozen times throughout his lifetime, including as a longform poem, and Christopher finally synthesised what he considers to be the most complete possible version by piecing together various incomplete fragments from across the decades.
This story is set during the Elder Days, the First Age of MiddleEarth. A couple generations after Mortal Men first crossed the mountains from the east (fleeing an evil none will ever speak of), and some families have managed to live side by side with the Elves, and earn their respect. Some interesting philosophical debates spinning out of the differing points of view of a mortal doomed to die vs an immortal elf, who can afford to play the long game and outwait Evil's rise and fall. The hero Turin Turambar is cursed by the enemy Morgoth, but every misfortune he suffers is his own fault, the product of pride and misplaced courage. The last chapters are like those operas where every character gets a drawnout death scene, staggering round the stage still soliliquising, until the stage is a pile of corpses.
Interesting to compare Chistopher Tolkien's lifes work with some discussions we had regarding Trigger Mortis, and the challenge of finishing Fleming's abandoned story ideas. Tolkien Jr really has the opposite problem. Fleming at best would have left behind a few synopses, or writing exercises abandoned after two paragraphs. But Tolkien Sr seemed to have piled up warehouses full of never published abandoned drafts for his middleEarth mythologies, always returning to the same plots and characters but changing them each time and still never finishing them. I gather he submitted someof it as a proposed followup to The Hobbit, but it was rejected so he began a proper sequel instead, yet continued to rewrite this stuff obsessively for his own amusement. Almost like Stieg Larson's Amazing Adventures of Salander and Blomkvist. I'm surprised J.R.R. had any time for teaching classes at Oxford he must have spent so much time on this stuff. And now his son has made a lifelong career just out of putting all the abandoned fragments into publishable form.
The ‘story’ is crazy, the dialogue is hilarious and it’s just gets sillier and sillier with every turned page - I absolutely loved it for all the wrong reasons
some notorious British murderers.
Two previous book's worth mentioning.First John Dickson Carr's The constant suicides' .Carr was undoubtably the master of the locked room type of mysteries.Also wrote as Çarter Dickson'.
The other was Flemings,'For your eyes only',which included 'Quantom of solace'.Picked it up for one Australian dollar.It needed very little knowledge of Bermuda to guess the identity of the Bermudian playboy.I once played cricket against his side.Late 1940's/early 1950's.
This is a book in the Jack Reacher series. As always it's action-packed, has an interesting mystery and Reacher beats up a large number of people. It's a direct sequel to "61 hours", one of the best Reacher novels.
I think it was a mistake by Tom Cruise to film "Never go back" now. He should have made "61 hours", then "Worth dying for" and finally "Never go back".
If Cruise is human (I said "if"!) he'll be too old as well as too short to play Jack Reacher anymore.
Then someone younger who looks like Reacher can do the remaining novels in cronological order, starting with" The killing floor". Maybe HBO could make it?
I got "Gorbachev - his life and times" by William Taubman in the mail today. I probably won't have time to read it in a long time, but I'm looking forward to it
Dwayne Johnson was up for Reacher once over, until Cruise bought the rights 8-) he’d have been FAR better...all the Reacher books are a decent read.
a good rep. As for the movies, the first wasn't bad but the Second ...
The first couple are a bit ropey...but readable...they then get stronger before tailing off into mediocrity, still enjoyable but rather absurd...
Pastiche Sherlock Holmes, part of a long series and a perfectly acceptable substitute for the real thing once you've read the originals.
Solar Pons lives at 7b Praed Street with his associate Dr Parker (who narrates the stories), looked after by their long-suffering landlady Mrs Johnson. He's often called upon by Inspector Jamieson to help with cases which have Scotland Yard baffled, and his brother Bancroft holds an influential Government position...
Completely the same as I've found them tbh, the last one I read was the one where most of the book is set in the car. Not bothered since.
I guess tastes differ I love the Reacher books . Along with Kyle Mills( he took over Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp)and Daniel Silva I get their latest when released.
On balance I probably read more historical fiction though.
Found this book disappointing after her excellent opener - Art in the Blood...this second one just didn’t get going at all for me
This is book one of the Slough House series, about a group of failed spies who are condemned to performing menial intelligence tasks in a dingy building known as Slough House. I've been hearing a lot of great stuff about this series, and from my experience so far I would certainly agree that this is one of the best spy novels around. What really makes it is the characters and the way that Herron creates this grubby little corner of the intelligence world. These are certainly not spy novels in the James Bond mould, more like Len Deighton or Le Carre territory, but in my opinion a lot easier and entertaining to read than Le Carre.
I'm worried....
A number of contemporary authors working in different generes have been asked to write their versions of the Bard's plays. Nesbø chose Macbeth and it's a good fit. In his Macbeth it take place in an un-named city in Scottland in the 1970's.The city has been in decline since the war, steeped in drugs and unemployment. Macbeth is the commander of the Guard (SWAT) and a reformed drug addict. He is in love with Lady, the owner of one of the two casinos in the city. The story is about the struggle for Macbeth's soul, power over the city and the relationship between Macbeth and Lady.
I found the novel worth reading, but it's not one of Nesbø's best. Even though he hardly quotes Shakespear, the language is at times too stilted and theatrical. If you don't read Shakespear, but would like to familiarize yourself with Macbeth I reccomend reading this book followed by the exellent and much more faithful movie version of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
Yes I've read and enjoyed the Reacher books even though it has bone crunching violence on the villains.
I'm reading the paperback of A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre. Very absorbing and the story flows quickly about
Peter Guillam being grilled by the powers that be about events 30 years previously.
Bleuville.
Took me a while to read (542 pages) but was well worth it. I finished this yesterday. I was wondering why it was so successful and now I know. Very well constructed with good character development and like Fleming at the end of the chapters you can't wait to start the next one. Couldn't wait to watch the film (2009) that I planned to watch over two nights as it goes for almost 3 hours but this too was excellent and watched it in one sitting. Highly recommend both the novel and the film. Will start the Girl who Played with Fire today.
The Mammoth Book of Cover Ups
Most of you have a budget bookshop in your local mall with dodgy titles such as this going for £3 or so. This one is another Conspiracies book but actually it's well written and quite sceptical (which annoys the hell out of some Amazon reviewers!). It deals with 100 cover ups or conspiracies in chapters, and affords a credibility rating (Alert Rating) at the end to surmise how likely it is there was a cover up. Pearl Harbor gets a 10, in other words it's taken as read that Roosevelt let it go ahead to propel the US into the war. Others get high ratings, such as the 'murder' of Dr David Kelly, the whistleblower over the Iraq dodgy dossier, a rating that is backed up by a recent book on the subject. Some get 0 such as Holocaust Denial, which is fair enough, though why the Royal Family being lizards gets a '1' suggesting it's marginally more likely, I couldn't say. Disappointingly, 'Elvis Lives' gets a 0 because I'd like to see him tour again.
The author points out that most conspiracies are tarnished by association, the wilder stuff put about by David Icke for instance.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Still bad logic is always fun. Good exercise for the reasoning chops, I like to come up with a really stupid theory and run with it, fleshing out so many funny details that you really want it to be true. It's just too bad it's now the official mainstream philosophy. Evil self centred scientists out to get rich quick from those lucrative grants, out to ruin the lives of those nice innocent oil men who just want to help the little people, and so on. And somehow, all the scientific advancement that led to the personal computer, the internet, universal access to just about any data you could imagine, has somehow led to counterrational conspiracy logic becoming more popular than ever.
I mean, not to get too political, but Pizzagate? it worked. who cares if its easily debunked, it worked so it is a proven electoral tool that will be recycled next time and will indoobitably work again. It's like Rene Descartes need never have bothered. Silly human race.
The funny thing about this new book is that when it skirts over one conspiracy in just a couple of pages - the faked moon landing, for instance, you think hmmm, okay, so not looking into that one, are we? And why nothing on Scientologists? That said, I'm not sure they or Jehovah's Witnesses are associated with any cover ups really, except the former do cover up their actual beliefs, they are not transparent.
Bond references - it says the moon buggy scene in DAF is a deliberate reference to the fake moon landing conspiracy, and that the inspiration for Q was involved in the Rudolf Hess landing during the war, there are two conspiracies going on there, very interesting. The Q guy was asked by the UK team to make up a duplicate uniform for Hess which he said he thought could only happen if they were going to use a double. Some of it does make your head hurt a bit though...
The book was published in 2007 so is quite out of date.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I just finished this audio book of the latest adventure of Harry Hole. Don't be alarmed by the fact that Harry Hole is happy (
The final death toll will make up about a quarter of Norway's average yearly number of murders, just like the other books in the series. Harry's son Oleg is at the police accademy and contributes in the investigation for the first time. The plot and atmosphere is solid as usual, but the scene where a certain person confesses could have been taken straight out of a "Colombo" episode. Still, I reccomend "Thirst" to any of Jo Nesbø's fans.