A Book A Week (#1B1W) - Facing reality

I set out to read at least one book each week. When facing the reality of studying and teaching I have to admit that I cannot reach this goal. Don’t get me wrong, I read a lot. But mostly long articles in Instapaper or plain webpages and books I need to have read to give lessons in school. I also do not want to read short books that I am not interested in just to impress people with a large number of books I’ve read this month. At the moment the only trilogy I am longing for is A Song of Ice and Fire. Therefore what I am going to do is to keep reading the books I like and keep you updated. Maybe I’ll even write about my reading and posting workflow, but this is a whole other story. 

Finished reading From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

This Bond novel is different. Normally, in the first few chapters we see James Bond enjoying himself in a bar or his hotel suite with either a drink or a pretty girl beside him. Then M tells him of a doomsday plot by a S.M.E.R.S.H.-related lunatic and James must figure out how to prevent a bomb from exploding or British gold from being robbed (or a combination of the two). In From Russia with Love Ian Fleming decided to take a different approach. Up until page 115 the narrator focusses (only!) on the Russian side of the story. The reader is told how the plot of killing Bond is being engineered in excruciating detail (characterisations of the killer, the female mastermind and the beautiful red herring). The next third of the novel describes how James Bond gets to Turkey and the useless stuff he does there waiting for the girl (quote from him on p. 214: „ And I’ve got absolutely nowhere to go with my main job.“). At last in chapter 20 Bond meets the girl in his bedroom and let his charms work the job. Sadly, after this encounter the orient express that is this Bond novel heads back to who-cares town. The last frustration this story provides is the lack of a real ending, in Bond-terminology that means a last time in bed with the current female protagonist. All in all From Russia with Love is the weakest Bond novel I’ve read so far. It lacks everything that makes Bond Bond: coolness, suspense, puns, drinking in bars, an arch-enemy, … I guess this is because the sole aim of the S.M.E.R.S.H. plot is to eliminate Bond without further consequences like killing hundreds of people or destroying something of value. We know that Bond will survive this sequence of events - I mean who are we kidding? the story of Dr. No and Goldfinger are yet to come - and so we turn the pages anticipating the (annoying lack of an) ending.