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Title: Thunderball

Author: Ian Fleming

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 264

Rating 3.5/5

I thought I’d read all of the Bond novels, but apparently not! I’d somehow missed this one, but the good news is that while I have seen most of the films, I don’t really remember them. That meant that I could read this as though I was experiencing the story for the first time, which was fun.

It’s interesting because it shows its age, especially because of the fact that it reflects the fears of the cold war and the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. And yet even though it seems a little dated, it still holds up pretty well. A lot of the ideas in here could still happen today, even if they came about through a different diplomatic landscape, and the action is pretty good too.

Some of the Bond books have bored me, especially when they’ve contained lengthy paragraphs about a single game of bridge or golf or something. There wasn’t really anything like that to worry about here, although there was a casino scene. Mostly though, the action was pretty quick and it never felt as though the story was slowing down.

The only thing I would say is that the ending almost felt as though it came out of nowhere, and so because of that it was a little bit of a let-down. That happens a lot with the Bond novels though, and so don’t worry too much. If you’ve read and enjoyed the Bond books before, you’ll enjoy it.

Click here to buy Thunderball.

P. G. Wodehouse – Thank You, Jeeves | Review

Title: Thank You, Jeeves

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 286

Rating: 3*/5

P. G. Wodehouse – Thank You, Jeeves

I was expecting so much more from this book. After all, this is the first book in Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, and it’s this series that established his reputation as something of a comic genius. The problem is that his humour isn’t particularly funny, and in this book it’s effectively downright racist. Much of the comedy surrounds what happens when the characters decide to “black up” to disguise themselves as “nigger minstrels” and are unable to find the butter they need to remove it.

So as you can imagine, the book hasn’t aged particularly well, and quite a lot of the situations that the characters find themselves in are no longer relevant to our lives today. Still, that’s to be expected to a certain extent with any classic, and you can’t really fault Wodehouse for it. That doesn’t make it any easier to swallow it when you’re not enjoying it, though.

It’s a shame, really, because I liked the way that Wodehouse strings sentences together. I just didn’t find the subject matter to be particularly interesting, and it also wasn’t that amusing. It reminded me of one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, except if you cut out the dramatic confrontation with the arch-nemesis and instead extend a card game or a round of golf to 200 pages. Like a rubbish sandwich, it was 80% filler with very little substance.

Go ahead and try the Jeeves and Wooster books if you’d like, but I wasn’t impressed. The good news is that Wodehouse wrote dozens of books with different characters. That doesn’t help much here, though.