I’ve been in a weird reading space since May began. Over that span I did not enjoy two of the books I have completed. As I mentioned in my previous RN post, I only finished Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards because I’m stubborn. I think that effort wore me down, as shortly afterward I quit a book after struggling with it for over a week. Put all of that together and in the last four weeks I’ve only logged two books into my reading list for 2023.
Retracing the Iron Curtain – Timothy Phillips
This was the one book I finished that I did enjoy. Phillips travels from where Norway and Russia touch down to the border between Turkey and Armenia. Along the way he explores where the Iron Curtain separated East from West during the Cold War. He tells stories of both the past and present, and how the ages are irrevocably connected because of the trauma of the Cold War era. While I’m sure this will appeal most to people who came up in that time, it is filled with fascinating stories that should appeal to any history buff.
Transcription – Kate Atkinson
I get a newsletter a couple times each week that shares good crime/thriller/espionage reads. I’m pretty sure I found this book via that list. It promised a cracking story that bridged the early days of World War II and the early days of the Cold War when the world was still trying to find its footing.
While promising, the story did not live up to my expectations.
The World War II stuff was interesting. It focused on a British government effort to spy on Brits who were sympathetic to the Nazis and plotting to force the UK to get out of the war in 1940.
However, the shift to 1950 did not work nearly as well. There was a lot of meandering about. While I knew Atkinson was building towards something, it was never clear what. When she finally offered her big reveal – one apparently based on real events – I was more confused than thrilled. I thought she didn’t build to that twist in an effective way, taking away much of its potential shock value.
So the story was kind of a bummer. It did get me thinking about how long people will continue to write about World War II. Forever, I guess? We just passed the 79th anniversary of D-Day and are still getting tons of new books, both fiction and non-fiction, about the war each year. I guess it is the most evil collective act in our species’ history, so until something worse comes along it will continue to push people to write about it.
Abandoned Book
Double or Nothing – Kim Sherwood
My threshold for continuing to read a book has always been about 100 pages. If I’m not enthralled with it by that point, I usually don’t feel bad about putting it down and trying something else. Get deeper and I feel obligated to knock out whatever is left, even if it isn’t entertaining me.
I made it right to 100 pages on this, but it took something like 10 days to get that far. As I didn’t feel inspired to pick it up each day, I decided to send it back to the library rather than renew it and attempt to push further.
That’s a real shame, because this is the beginning of a new chapter in the literary 007 series. Sherwood has been contracted to write three 007 novels, and she was not shy about taking the series in a very different direction. In this novel James Bond is missing, and presumed dead, a trope that has been used before in the 007 world. Sherwood places the focus on the remaining double-oh agents and their search both for Bond and their investigation into the Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos figure Bond was looking into before his disappearance.
Sherwood’s 00 world reflects modern Britain. Her spies are very diverse, comprising of men and women, children of immigrants with very non-traditional British names, and even a gay agent.
That’s all fine with me, although I wonder if introducing so many characters at once was part of the reason I struggled to connect with her story.
The bigger issue, I think, was that Sherwood might be too good of a writer to pen a James Bond novel. Double-oh stories, good or bad, should always have a pulpy, tongue-in-cheek quality to them, an element that was definitely missing here. It felt much more like a standard espionage thriller, firmly rooted in reality. I say that as a massive fan of the Daniel Craig 007 world, which scaled the ridiculousness way back for a healthy dose of realism. But where the Craig movies featured so much amazing action, Sherwood’s story lacked those set pieces that keep the story exciting and moving.
A shame, as I would have liked to see how she carries the series forward. Might be time to be done with the James Bond stuff for awhile and pick one of the, oh, 8000 or so other spy series I could dive into.