In my last post on Live and Let Die, I said I was almost done reading it and might come back and share some of my favorite quotes. Well… in the few days that I’ve been gone from here, I’ve finished one book and started another, but I’m STILL here to share those quotes. I know you were waiting patiently. I can’t let you down!

I shared only four quotes on my new Bookstagram account, but there were so many more cool ones.

First off, a prime example of how my TBR list expands exponentially each time I read another book. M. recommends a book about Jamaica so that Bond can know a bit about what he’s going into. He’s not only incredibly handsome and tough, but he also reads. …swoons…

“Naked, Bond walked out into the lobby and tore open some of the packages. Later, in white shirt and dark blue trousers, he went into the sitting-room, pulled a chair up to the writing-desk near the window and opened The Travellers Tree, by Patrick Leigh Fermour.”

He just walks into the lobby of the hotel NAKED? No, he has his own lobby in his suite. But… I’m sure no one would mind. I mean, it’s James Bond. But we’re here to talk about the book he referenced. After reading the description on Amazon, I added it to my wish list. I can experience a bit of the glory of the place without leaving my desert.

“’Of course there are some bad ones’, he said.
’In any half a million people of any race you’ll get plenty of stinkeroos.’”

Very true, Mr. Fleming.

“Was it true what The Big Man had said, that she would have nothing to do with men? He doubted it. She seemed open to love and to desire. At any rate he knew she was not closed to him. He wanted her to come back and sit down opposite him again so that he could look at her and play with her and slowly discover her. Solitaire. It was an attractive name.”

Solitaire had made it clear she was helping him and wanted something in exchange at their first “meeting,” while he was held captive and threatened by Mr. Big. Of course, Bond thinks it’s an invitation for an amorous rendezvous. In Bond’s defense, he seems to care about her… based on how hot and helpless she is… eek…

You know what would be a great piece of fanfiction? A story from Solitaire’s point of view. Where she came from, her thoughts and feelings about being abducted by Mr. Big, and how she’s using Bond to get out of that situation and on her own. I wonder if it’s been done.

The glory of a Bond book is that it’s all his point of view. The other characters are fairly shallow. But then again, so is Bond. That’s not a bad thing, just an observation.

“Bond laughed. ‘What an organization!’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s all beautifully covered up and alibied. What a man! He certainly seems to have the run of his country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven’t got him on our hands in England. Wooden truncheons wouldn’t make much of a dent in him.’”

What with habeas corpus and human rights? Yeah… can’t get much done around here, can we? Jeepers. The truth though, you can push a democracy around fairly easy, if you have enough money to buy it. Add to that a population that doesn’t know it’s rights or why they have them. A myriad of problems plague this “democracy” these days. I wonder what Bond would think of that.

“The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.”

A bit of poetry here. I imagine it would be frustrating instead of beautiful for Bond. All that up there that he can’t harness and control.

“Bond looked at the whisky bottle, then made up his mind and poured half a glass on top of three ice cubes. He took the box of Benzedrine tablets out of his pocket and slipped a tablet between his teeth.
‘Here’s luck,’ he said to Strangways and took a deep swallow.”

That line actually made me laugh. Nothing like a good shot of whisky and bennie as you take off on your big mission to stop the bad guys from making money for the commies. These were “government issued” bennies, though, so that makes it safe. You need to stay relaxed AND alert when you’re doing these jobs. Yeah, a few people may die, collateral damage and all, but you gotta do what you gotta do to stop the commies, right?

Last one, I promise.

“You have doubtless read Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, Mister Bond. Well, I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a ‘criminal.’”

Yes, I did look that book up too, but I didn’t add it to my list. I found the book itself, but no articles about it came up. On Wikipedia, there are a couple quotes from it, along with the Bond reference, but that’s all. Apparently, in the one hundred years it’s been around, it hasn’t had all that much influence.

But I did like the wolf and sheep idea. It reminded me of Babe, the movie. Remember? “Bah. Ram. Ewe.” That was great movie, for kids and adults. It had depth, and it was dark and sweet, like life really is.

Sorry… I’m back!

So, did I like Live and Let Die? Yes. It was entertaining and gave me glimpses into another world. Would I read more Bond books? Probably not. “It’s not my bag, baby.” I started to think about the recent re-write debacle and thought, maybe it would be better to put some context at the beginning of the new edition, instead of editing it. Don’t just add a “trigger warning,” explain when and where this book came from, what the author might have been trying to convey, and point out how much has changed. Maybe suggest what we can learn from it. A new Forward or Introduction? 

Click back over to my first post, New Read: Live and Let Die for more of my thoughts on this book.