What We've Been Reading

Reina:
La casa de los espíritus.I started reading it a few winters ago but never quite got the momentum going. Luckily, I'm finding that I still have some Spanish comprehension skills left in me. Enough to get by. Missing out on a fourth of the individual words hasn't got me down! I still feel as though I'm picking up on some nuances and some humor that make the book more than just a story. They make it a memorable one. And I'm only 20 pages in. Again. Cross your fingers that I can make it to the top of the hill. I think I can...

Oh, and Isabel Allende. She's Chilean and writes in that magical realist style.

Dustin:
I recently took a day off of life and did nothing at all. I spent the entire day on my couch drinking coffee and reading; it was everything I could have hoped for. The day before I decided I must do a little preparation and made my way to the Strand after work, and for some reason I decided I needed to purchase an Ian Fleming book. Mostly because I like pulp fiction and I've never read any Bond. At the time, it seemed to me that Fleming wasn't that far removed from pulp novels. Naturally I purchased Octopussy.

According to the introduction by Robert Ryan Octopussy is an odd Bond novel because it's the only one of the films that really isn't based on a book; it's more of an olio of short stories that revolve around the basic framework of the book. (A primary source being the short Bond story "The Living Daylights.") It's also odd because it's a very short novella, which isn't the standard for Bond either.

What I found truly shocking is that Fleming is a good writer and the book didn't have any action at all. In fact, it barely had Bond in it. It was the story of a man who'd retired to the Caribbean (with some money that wasn't his) and was going to a reef every day to sit by an octopus so that the octopus would get used to him and some day come out to touch him in a friendly way. And as any respectable person would, he'd named the octopus Pussy.

He'd done terrible things in the past, during WWII, and Bond shows up to tell him the government figured out what he'd done and he was going to have to go back to England. That's it really. It's just a short conversation between Major Dexter Smythe and Bond and then Bond leaves again and Smythe goes and reminisces in the ocean floating near his octopus. I'm cutting out all the plot put and the flashbacks, but that's the gist of it, and it's was really kind of awesome.