And then Bond fought a giant squid

I know when I was reading this I found lots of ridiculous quotes but I didn't mark them down and I can't find them right now.  So that title isn't a quote but it is what happened and is just as ridiculous.  It's too bad there were no lasers.  Also I guess this kind of includes spoilers but the title does as well and you've probably already read that.  Sorry.  Don't worry, it wasn't a huge surprise.

This would have been
awesome too.

Dr. No by Ian Fleming was a fun book and if you're a big fan of the movies I'm sure you would have enjoyed this more than I did.  For me it was entertaining.  At least a third of the entertainment came from the fact that it shows it's age and I enjoyed reading my friend passages that I would not feel comfortable reading to the general public.* The rest of it is the same sort of entertainment you'd expect from a Bond film.  A Bond film pre-Daniel Craig, where it's cheesier and has the evil-maniacal super-villain with a secret lair built into the side of a mountain.  Also a pain obstacle course that ends in giant squid fight!  I mean all of this as a compliment.  It's not a deep book with complex characters or subtle themes but really, if you're reading Bond for those things you're doing it wrong.

I would like to mention the part that I seem to keep dwelling on in the book and that goes along with the I-would-be-uncomfortable-reading-this-aloud-in-public, though apparently not discussing it publicly here:  Chigroes, which were a regular feature throughout the novel.  I want to explain why I've brought them up multiple times and not just because I thought they were horribly racially insensitive.  It's also because I can't think of too many other races/nationalities that you can smoosh the 2 together to create a descriptor for the person.  What I mean is Boyfriend is Puerto Rican** and Chinese and refers to himself as China Rican***.  (Or Chinarican.  I should ask him to spell it out for me.)  I haven't heard this happen with different nationalities but if you can think of examples, or want to make some up, please throw them out there.  So I guess this was just my "I swear I'm not racist and just find this funny.  I'm sure that makes me kind of a bad person but whatever" excuse.

*I'm not saying Fleming was a racist (probably sexist in a Don Draper kind of way) but that it was just the time.  It just makes it awkwardly funny now.  To me anyway.

**Blogger spell check does not recognize Puerto Rican as a set of words.  If I go with their first spell check options I get Puerile Rica.  Yup, that's what I was going for.  Thanks for the help.

***The classic sensibilities of a Chinese man mixed with dynamic flair of a Puerto Rican.  Boyfriend is a fan of Conan and the Pimpbot 5000.

Morning 007

Normal day at the office

I decided to give some Ian Fleming a go, mostly because of my brother, for 2 reasons.  He's a James Bond fan and I'm pretty sure his last job was for a James Bond-esque villain.  Maybe not Dr. No but at least someone like Hank Scorpio (who by the way is one of my favorite one-time Simpsons characters).  He described some of the projects he was working on and they all seemed to involve lasers pointed at a person, usually aimed at the jugular or eyeball.  Sure, he claims it was part of some elaborate lie detector test that involves measuring heart rate or eye movements, but I assume it's a lie detector that involves making the person tell the truth or you shoot them with lasers.  He also recently described part of his office as the "command center" and this is apparently not just some nerdy nickname but the actual name of the place.  I've advised him to quit immediately if they ask him to start wearing a jumpsuit to work.

I haven't see the movie Dr. No, so other than the usual Bond hijinks I wasn't too sure what I was in for.  My initial thoughts are this book has not aged all that well.  The book was written in '58 and displays the racial sensitivities you would expect of a book from this time.  One of the characters, Quarrel, is described as "West Indian" and is given the dialect to match.  I hate when authors do this because it makes it that much more difficult to read unless I'm reading it out loud, which is generally discouraged when in public.  Here's a bit of his speech describing Dr. No:

"'Him have plenty watchmen. An' guns - machine guns.  An' a radar.  An' a spottin' plane.  Frens o' mine have landed dere and him never been sen again. Dat Chinee keep him island plenty private.  Tell dat trut', cap'n', Quarrel as apologetic 'dat Crab Key care me plenty.'" (40)

So that's been fun to wade through so far. There are also some Chinese-Africans called Chigroes (racial sensitivity!)

Even though I haven't seen Dr. No, I can't help but already have a vision of what Bond is like.  Thus far he's somewhere between Connery and Craig, although I understand that Bond as Fleming has written him is even more amoral than the version Craig plays.  So far M fits this description.  In the first few pages he's listing off organs that his agents can go without, including: "one of his two lungs" and "two of his four or five quarts of blood," (13).  Considering this is Bond's boss, no wonder he's a bad ass.  There's also a picture of Fleming on the inside cover and I now picture him as M.  He has this expression on his face that says "I'm tired of your bullshit and if you keep this up, I'm putting this cigarette out in your eye."  M is so well defined in a few pages, I'm hoping Bond gets fleshed out more.  Hopefully once Quarrel has wandered off so I don't need to read his lines anymore.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes.  If anyone has read any of the Bond books, let me know which you liked better: the book or the movies.  I know in general the books are better but so far this has the potential to show me that I like the film version of Bond.

Fleming, Ian.  Dr. No.  Penguin Books, New York.  2002.